The second that Sofia Falcone walks into that fateful household dinner sporting that yellow costume in The Penguin‘s fourth episode, “Cent’anni,” actress Cristin Milioti solidified the character as among the best Batman villains ever. Her canary in the coal mine second is among the present’s finest scenes, and was crafted in a collaboration between Milioti, Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc, and director Helen Shaver.
By then we’d seen the occasions that led the mob heiress to be scapegoated by her father for the murders by the hands of the Hangman and her trauma at Arkham due to him; she was solely freed of his sins after his demise in The Batman. But even then, her freedom got here with extra dangerous juju, no because of Oz, as she rapidly misplaced her brother and their drug empire plans in the current day. In “Cent’anni,” she was going through her household persevering with to gaslight her by sending her off to Italy in an try and take her energy like so many others earlier than her.
In an interview with IndieWire, the actress shared how a lot of a crew effort it was to create her dream Batman villain position with LeFranc. “Pretty much as soon as I signed on. I had an hours-long phone call with Lauren where she walked me through everything, and then I got the first four scripts in,” Milioti stated. “I had time to call her and talk to her and really sit with them and study them, and she sort of walked me through the last four in terms of what happens, the big events there, but so I got them pretty soon after I signed on.”
From the beginning Milioti was sport for something. “I’m such a huge Batman fan, it’s lifelong dream of mine to be a Batman villain and to get to really show her entire story. For that to come from a woman’s brain—you can just like sense it, you can feel it,” she stated.
The yellow costume launched many a Reddit thread on the place to search out it; in reality, it was created by costume designer Helen Huang particularly for the second Sofia steps into her energy. “I had 10,000 fittings for that dress,” she stated. “We were in constant conversation with Helen about what would be the most free flowing and let you see this body language—that’s the first time you see her breathe really, and experience joy, and experience lightness … and yet we wanted it to show all the scars, and then we also knew it was going with this gas mask eventually, so I also wanted to do something with her eyes where you could see it through the viewfinder of the gas mask.”
Milioti described Sofia’s entrance in the scene as exhibiting off her”new warfare paint,” and signaling that “there’s been a shift in her. To combine all those things was so exciting. And also knowing we were building this Batman villain, like when do you get to do that?”
Milioti hopes she’ll get to return to the position as a lot as all of us do, since there “infinite possibilities” on the place Sofia can go subsequent.
“Obviously I would want to see her get out of Arkham. That’s like number one. I don’t want her in there. So I want to see her get out there, and then exact revenge,” she stated. “Maybe now she would be even more of a loose cannon, because before it was pretty focused on him and gaining power, but depending on what happens to her in there, it could be an even larger target. I would love to explore that.”
The Penguin is streaming on Max.
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