Cristin Milioti attends the premiere of HBO's The Penguin at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, on Sept. 17.Evan Agostini
Here’s the thing about Cristin Milioti: she tends to be a trauma queen.
You probably know her as the mysterious matriarch in How I Met Your Mother, the phenomenally popular and frivolous sitcom, which, upon Milioti’s arrival, became about the death of a parent and how to bounce back from grief. Or maybe you remember her starring in the time-looping sci-fi rom-com Palm Springs, as a woman burying her pain in sex and booze; or in a show called Made For Love, where she plays a woman on the run from a suffocating marriage. The theatre kid who broke out on Broadway’s Once tends to bring a heaviness to material that on paper reads like a good time.
“Life is a fine line between laughing and crying,” she says. Milioti, an extremely fun personality whose career has been a balancing act of screwball comedy and really dark material, talked to The Globe and Mail on a Zoom call about her love of acting, which, for her, means tapping into every corner of the human experience.
“Sometimes it takes watching a movie or a play, or listening to a song, to unlock something in me and let me feel something, or let me think about something differently. It’s all a way of communion with each other and saying that we are all going through these things. I try to bring everything to a character, even if it’s the harder stuff.”
Milioti also spoke about her latest stranglehold on our emotions in The Penguin, a new Batman spinoff series in which she makes herself right at home. She brings the same coiled intensity and fragility we see in all her work to her role as Gotham’s new baddie Sofia Falcone, the unhinged mobster princess who arrives fresh from Arkham Asylum, after her father Carmine Falcone’s demise, announcing that she has been “re-HA-bilitated.”
Milioti was looking her part during our interview, dolled up in a Black cocktail dress that leaves her shoulder exposed with silver hoop earrings. She’s perfectly poised at the centre of a hotel room, backlit by an ominous red glow to look like she’s in her villain’s lair. It’s an amusingly imposing composition for such a warm and animated actress. Milioti talks with big but precise hand gestures – as though she’s conducting – especially when relaxing into a conversation about Batman iconography and reveals her own geeky affections for the franchise.
When I mention Joel Schumacher’s Batman films, she perks up. We both have an appreciation for his flamboyantly gay aesthetic, including the Bat nipples and repeat crotch shots in the much-derided Batman & Robin.
When she was 10 years old, Batman Forever became Milioti’s gateway drug. “I just was obsessed with it,” she says. “It was cartoony. It’s larger than life … and … like … neon! Everyone’s going for broke. Jim Carrey’s Riddler is going for it.”
The theatre kid jumps out as she goes off about Schumacher’s embrace of camp, which is something Milioti argues was there in the seminal Tim Burton films (not to mention the Adam West series) and is built into Batman’s whole vibe. “You’re dealing with a slight level of camp whenever you’re talking about someone putting on a costume and taking into the night.”
Schumacher’s unabashed campiness provoked the franchise reset that made way for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and every imitator after that took his heightened political allegories and leaned further into the dark and moody department. Matt Reeves’s The Batman is perhaps the most oppressively serious. Robert Pattinson gives an excessively brooding take on the caped crusader, who goes up against a Riddler weaponizing reactionary politics and young men easily radicalized on internet forums.
While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the movie, Milioti defended the way Reeves captured Gotham’s essence through his characters. “The line between Batman and his villains, they’re close,” she says. “They’re all taking things into their own hands. They’re attempting to right a perceived wrong. They come from this place, wanting the world to feel what they’re feeling; wanting to heal something that maybe can’t be healed.”
Milioti humbly checked herself for giving a “dissertation on Batman,” even though she knows this material on a molecular level. She described what makes The Penguin work so well. The TV series picks up in the immediate aftermath of The Batman. Colin Farrell, wearing layers of heavy latex, reprises his take on Oswald Cobb. Friends call him Oz. Jerks call him the Penguin, because of his disfigured appearance and hobble. The show, which at times feels like a superficial imitation of The Sopranos, follows Oz as he attempts to take over Gotham’s narcotics trade while violently grappling with mommy and self-esteem issues.
He’s also trying to win Sofia Falcone’s trust, or at least keep her from seeing right through him. She emerges from a Requiem For A Dream-style stint at Arkham, an emotional mess dressed in fine furs, with a violent history of gaslighting and abuse informing the many scores she’s out to settle.
If The Penguin is an immediate improvement over The Batman, it’s because of the vulnerability and warmth shared between Oz and Sofia, who together work out emotional issues and traumas that began with their parents, while playing a cat-and-mouse game of their own.
The show is never as good when it strays from Sofia’s orbit, because Milioti gives such a sensational performance. She has us hanging on every head tilt, elongated vowel and the heaviness in her breath. Sofia always seems to be gasping for air, even when she’s the one controlling the atmosphere.
Milioti never gets to reclaim that Schumacher-level camp in her performance, but she points to at least one scene when she bends the aesthetic to her theatre kid whims. Midway through the season, Milioti’s Sofia glides through a mansion to the tune of Sarah Vaughan’s So Long, My Love after committing mass murder, complimenting her flowing citrus gown with a gas mask and a handgun.
“It has an element of [being] larger than life,” says Milioti. “It feels like an opera. Batman has always felt very operatic to me.”
The Penguin premiered Sept. 19 on Crave with new episodes streaming Sundays beginning Sept. 29.