Cristin Milioti creates a new mob princess with her 'feral' character in 'The Penguin'

In "The Penguin," Cristin Milioti plays the daughter of a dead mob boss out for power and vengeance. But the Cherry Hill native actress wouldn't call her character a mob princess, or even necessarily a queenpin.

"Like a queen ... creature?" she suggested. "There's something a little feral there."

The distinction is understandable. Milioti's character, Sofia Falcone, defies easy categorization. She begins "The Penguin," HBO's Batman spinoff series premiering Thursday, as the prodigal daughter returning home to the Falcone crime family after her father Carmine's death and a decade-long stint at Arkham Asylum. As foot soldiers like Oz Cobb — aka the Penguin — jockey for Carmine's crown, Sofia makes her own bid for head of the family. She also slowly unravels the truth of what landed her in a barbaric mental institute, where she received electroshock therapy and beatings from unstable patients. 

"This character felt very once in a lifetime," Milioti said. "The things I get to do with her and explore with her felt very singular."

Some spoilers for "The Penguin" and "The Batman" are included below.

Milioti leads "The Penguin" with Colin Farrell, returning to the role of Oz Cobb he inhabited for the 2022 movie "The Batman." The series picks up immediately after the events of that film, which plunged Gotham into catastrophe. Poor neighborhoods like Crown Point are still recovering from the floods the Riddler unleashed when he blew up the seawall. The supervillain also created a massive power vacuum in the criminal underworld by killing Carmine Falcone, played by John Turturro in the film but recast as Mark Strong in flashbacks on "The Penguin." Falcone's son Alberto (Michael Zegen) appears to be the heir apparent. But Oz and, eventually, Sofia have other plans.

Milioti, who graduated from Cherry Hill East High School, is no stranger to crime dramas. One of her earliest acting credits was a three-episode arc on "The Sopranos" and she also appeared in the second season of "Fargo" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" as Jordan Belfort's spurned first wife. "The Penguin," despite its comic book origins, is mostly a gritty mobster tale, too — though Milioti's Sofia is its wild card. While men like Oz quietly plot and double-cross, Sofia puts her guns on the table.

"None of them would've survived Arkham in the way that she did," Milioti said. "And so she knows that, but she has to operate under these rules and you see her buck against that. And then obviously break free of that in a very sinister, fantastic way."

Sofia's story is partially drawn from the Batman "Dark Victory" comic run. In both "Dark Victory" and "The Penguin," Sofia is known as the Hangman, a serial killer who murders victims with a noose. But the HBO series diverges from the comics in two crucial ways. The Hangman in "Dark Victory" targets cops, while the one in "The Penguin" goes after sex workers. And while Sofia is guilty as charged in the comics, she's a framed scapegoat on the show.

That makes Sofia's homecoming extra complicated.

"She's gone from Arkham to another incredibly unsafe space where she's back in the same place with the same people who framed her and betrayed her and gaslit her," Milioti said. "So she can't ever let go and she has to have her guard up."

Batman's fictional city of Gotham shares obvious DNA with New York, and "The Penguin" only furthers those comparisons. (Just listen to Farrell's accent.) But Milioti, who recently returned to Philadelphia for an Olivia Rodrigo concert, thinks Sofia could hack it on our city streets just as easily.

"I think she'd have a blast," she said.

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