[This story contains spoilers from the first seven episodes of The Penguin.]
Cristin Milioti has been earning widespread acclaim for her role in HBO’s The Penguin, playing the intense crime family heiress Sofia Falcone. While it would be tough for anyone to pick Milioti’s single best scene in the series, the actress herself has two favorites from the first seven episodes.
“I find watching myself as excruciating,” Milioti tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I think a lot of actors feel that way. But I will say, there are definitely scenes that I did that I loved doing and that I then watched and felt like [how the performance came across was] how it felt — which is sometimes rare. It doesn’t always translate.”
The first was the sequence from episode four where Sofia joins her family for their last supper — though her victims don’t know that yet. “I would say the speech at dinner with my family, and the ensuing aftermath,” she said, “that whole sequence from the minute I entered the dining room to the very end of the episode was very, very thrilling.”
The second scene was in Sunday night’s seventh episode, when Sofia visits the lone potential witness to her family’s killing spree, a young girl who’s now in an orphanage. Sofia tells the girl her family deserved their fate and threatens her to stay quiet, before realizing she’s doing exactly what her despised father would have done.
“I remember reading that scene and being like, ‘holy moly,’ it’s such a brutal scene,” Milioti says. “But I was so excited about it and so moved by it; it’s so complicated. But of course, this is what this person would do. What’s beautiful about that scene, too, is she’s quite literally trying to burn her father’s legacy to the ground and saying, ‘I’m nothing like him, he’s a monster,’ and she does the exact same thing to this little girl. She sentences her to the exact same life, in a way, but she truly is believing that she’s doing that child a service. In her mind, she’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 landing the role and her process for becoming the terrifying mobster. “I have dreamed of getting to play someone like this for a long time,” she said. “I am also a huge Batman fan and have dreamt of playing a villain in the Batman universe since I was a little kid. I used to pretend to be Batman villains in my backyard when growing up. And so, when this first came my way, I wanted it in a way that felt very deep. Once I signed onto it, and once I read more and more scripts, I was blown away that I was going to be able to get to do this. It was very profound. I just love her. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve gotten to do in my entire life.”
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The Penguin airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on HBO. The show’s finale is next week.
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