[This story contains spoilers from the first seven episodes of The Penguin.]
Cristin Milioti gained widespread acclaim for her role in the HBO series The Penguinas crime family heiress Sofia Falcone. While it would be difficult for anyone to pick Milioti's best scene in the series, the actress herself has two favorites from the first seven episodes.
“I find watching myself heartbreaking,” Milioti says The Hollywood journalist. “I think a lot of actors feel that way. But I have to say that there are definitely scenes that I've done that I loved doing and then I watched and liked [how the performance came across was] how it felt, which is sometimes rare. It doesn't always translate.”
The first was the sequence in episode four where Sofia joins her family for the last supper, even though her victims don't know it yet. “I would say that the dinner conversation with my family, and the aftermath that followed,” she said, “the whole sequence from the moment I walked into the dining room to the end of the episode was very, very thrilling.”
The second scene was in Sunday night's seventh episode, when Sofia visits the only potential witness to her family's killing spree, a young girl who is now in an orphanage. Sofia tells the girl that her family deserved their fate and threatens her to keep quiet, before realizing that she is doing exactly what her despised father would have done.
“I remember reading that scene and thinking, 'Holy shit,' that's a really brutal scene,” Milioti says. “But I was so excited about it and so moved; it's so complicated. But obviously this is what this person would do. The beautiful thing about that scene is that she's literally trying to raze her father's legacy and says, “I'm nothing like him, he's a monster,” and she does the exact same thing to this little girl. He condemns her to the exact same life, in a certain sense, but he really believes he is doing that little girl a service. In his mind, he's doing the right thing – “I'm saving you from something you don't know about” – while ruining this child's life.
Previously, Milioti discussed with THR getting the role and his process to become the terrifying mobster. “I've dreamed of playing someone like this for a long time,” he said. “I'm also a huge Batman fan and have dreamed of playing a villain in the Batman universe since I was a child. I pretended to be the Batman villain in my backyard when I was growing up. And so when it first happened to me, I wanted it in a way that was very profound. Once I got on board with the project, and once I read more and more scripts, I was amazed that I could do it. It was very profound. I just love it. It's one of my favorite things to do in my entire life.
***
The Penguin airs Sunday nights at 9pm on HBO. The show's finale is next week.