‘The Penguin’: In Transforming Into a Badass Crime Boss, Sofia Falcone Reclaims Her Name and Her Image

It’s the scene Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) transforms into a crime boss. Walking into the dining room where father Carmine (Mark Strong) held court, donning her mother’s fur coat over a small black slip dress, she bluntly tells the family’s remaining mid-level gangsters she gassed their bosses (“and I’m so glad they are dead”), before putting a bullet in the head of Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly), the one capo up until then she had spared.

“My family disposed of my mother like she was nothing, then they did the same to me,” says Sofia in Episode 5 of “The Penguin.” “My father’s legacy is dead. And we will never speak his name again. From this point on I am a Gigante, and this is a new family now.”

In the Batman comic books, Sofia Falcone does become Sofia Gigante, but it’s a last name she gets through marriage. “The Penguin” creator Lauren LeFranc told IndieWire she was never interested in Sofia having a husband but thought making Gigante her mother’s maiden name would be a way to honor the comics, but doing it on her (and her Sofia’s) own terms.

“In Episode 4 she discovers what her father did to her mother, that he silenced her,” said LeFranc. “She wants to be able to embody who her mother was, her spirit, so she goes finds that mink and puts it on and becomes a Gigante. It felt very empowering to me to give Sofia that, to say I’m not a Falcone, I just obliterated the Falcones. That’s not who I am, that’s never really who I was, and now I’m going to become a Gigante and this is how I’m going to run my own crime family.”

Costume designer Helen Huang smiles when she remembers the filming of Episode 5: “Cristin was really waiting for that sequence. She was ready for it when it arrived. She worked very hard on the makeup and then the hair and the whole look. She really wanted to embody it.”

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When they got into the wardrobe fitting, the creative team wondered if they had made a mistake: At the moment the character was unburdened, was the fur coat covering her up too much?

“And then Cristin was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to wear this off the shoulder,” said Huang. “I really love the scene because she’s really working that costume. She just walks in, she transformed her body language to work with the costume.”

The revealing slip underneath was an equally careful choice. Both LeFranc and Huang were extremely conscious of how women in the crime genre are often overly sexualized, something they had been careful to avoid in the first four episodes. However, as Sofia stops trying to hide her anger, the show’s creator, costumer, and lead actress all agreed it was important for the character to show more skin, reveal her scars, and embrace her femininity.

“When we first meet Sofia in the the first couple of episodes, she has a lot of anger living inside of her having lived ten years in Arkham [Asylum], but she’s trying to tamp everything down,” said LeFranc. “We discussed this with hair and makeup and wardrobe as well, she puts back on the clothes that Sofia might have worn before she was put in Arkham. She’s trying to inherently fit back into this mob patriarchal world, despite herself.”

Therefore, the starting point for crafting the look of Sofia would be grounded in Huang’s approach to the Falcones. Through his double-dealing with the government, Carmine Falcone was Gotham’s top crime boss for over two decades, accruing massive wealth, political influence, and an elite status. From costume to production design, “The Penguin” team thought of the family more akin to the Vanderbilts, more a product of the North Shore of Long Island world of “The Great Gatsby” than stereotypical New York gangsters, and the polar opposite of Oz (Colin Farrell) and his Crown Point working-class roots.

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“My conception is they’re very old – if you’re thinking about institutions, they’re old crime, it’s almost as if they have an older European air about them,” said Huang. “So we looked at a lot of 1960s Upper East Side kind of feeling.”

But post-Arkham, Sofia is only somewhat successful in slipping back into this world ten years after having been banished from it, which is something Huang would need to capture in her clothes.

“How can we make her feminine but not dress her in the usual, conventional way,” said Huang. “I thought a lot about Edie Sedgwick, that type of 1960s rebellious look.”

Sedgwick was the 1960s “It Girl,” who, before finding prominence as an actress, model, and socialite in Andy Warhol’s counterculture world, was a troubled girl who grew up in a wealthy and prominent family.

“So hemlines are shorter, so it’s very girly, but there’s also something very rebellious in that silhouette from the audience’s consciousness,” said Huang of what she borrowed from Sedwick’s style. “And I looked at Peter Lindbergh’s photographs of Kate Moss from 1994, so it’s ’90 does ‘60s, she was in vintage Hermes, just things that are very classic and beautiful.”

Cristin Milioti (Sofia Falcone) in the yellow dress at the end of Episode 4 of ‘The Penguin’Max

Working toward Sofia’s ultimate “Gigante” transformation into her mother’s fur, Huang made specific wardrobe decisions to signal the character’s evolution to this key scene in Episode 5. In Episode 3, working off LeFranc’s instructions it was time for Sofia to start showing more skin, Huang covered a dress in lace with cutouts, creating the delicate balance of being covered but still revealing. At the end of Episode 4, for what Huang described as the character’s “coming out, Hollywood moment” as she gases the family, she put her in a yellow-citrine dress — the heightened color striking a contrast as she strolled through the old wood Falcone mansion at night. And the next morning, at the beginning of Episode 5 when the police inquire about the supposed tragic gas leak, Milioti wears a simple black t-shirt and leather pants looking every bit the rebelous daughter. Later, lovingly pursuing her mother’s walk-in closet as she finds the fur coat, Huang and LeFranc purposely choose a white tuxedo shirt to signal a blank slate, a canvas for Sofia to define who she will be as boss.

Huang warns, as victorious and liberating a moment as the fur coat scene is, the wardrobe choice is not without warning signals. Observant viewers will note the coat is a mix-match of different furs.

“We purposely made it texturally not the same throughout; there’s a lot of different combinations to show off the unevenness,” said Huang of the fur coat. “Even as she decides to progress into this new version of herself, she’s still feeling her way through her emotions and decisions.”

“The Penguin” Episode 6 will air on HBO and Max on October 27.