🎧 Cristin Milioti on Staying Sane in 'Crazy-Making' Hollywood

'The Penguin' star goes deep on playing an unlikable character and the lingering toll of 2023's strikes

READY AIM FIRE “It’s like being shot out of a cannon at first,” says Cristin Milioti of working on a show like HBO’s The Penguin. “You go home every day just writhing in embarrassment at what you’ve done.” (Macall Polay/HBO)

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Cristin Milioti has been working in Hollywood long enough to have read a whole lot of casting notices for female characters that, more than anything else, were likable. The 39-year-old actress has played a lot of those roles very well, including the dream girl mother on How I Met Your Mother and the heroine of HBO Max’s tech dystopia comedy Made for Love. 

But one of the many thrills of HBO’s new series The Penguin, in which Colin Farrell reprises his underworld villain role from 2022’s The Batman, is seeing Milioti step so far beyond the boundaries of likability. Playing Sofia Falcone, the daughter of Gotham crime boss Carmine Falcone, the Cherry Hill, N.J. native arrives in her first scene fresh from Arkham Asylum, reminding anyone who will listen that she was accused of murdering seven people and fears no one. 

Even in a scene that’s friendly on the surface, reconnecting with her cousin for the first time since her 10 years in prison, Sofia exudes menace. “Not to sound like an actor — I hate when actors talk like this where they’re like, ‘It’s such a meal,” Milioti says, dropping into a funny parody voice that’s not unlike her “very sexy baby” of 30 Rock. “But you read a scene like that and you’re like, oh, it’s the dream. No one is saying what’s actually happening.”

On this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, Milioti and I discuss the huge pressure she put on herself to play this role, and her group of actor friends who try to convince her she won’t be fired from any part she gets (this one included). She also went deep on the lingering “existential reverberations” of the writer and actors’ strikes, and why she’s still putting up with “this completely mentally-ill industry that is crazy-making and is bad for us all.” 

The episode also includes a conversation between me and my old Vanity Fair colleague Chris Murphy, the author of the recent cover story on Wicked co-stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Chris is one of very few people who’s actually seen Wicked at this point, and he helped me break down the movie’s role in awards season and how other musicals — Emilia Perez, Moana 2, Mufasa and even this week’s much-maligned Joker: Folie á Deux — might fit into the mix. 

If you want more from me and Chris and some other special guests, come see us LIVE onstage at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, on Sunday, Oct. 20. Get your free tickets now!

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