SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from Sunday’s episode of The Penguin on HBO.
If HBO’s adaptation about the classic DC villain can be described as dark, then the fourth episode titled “Cent’Anni” is a straight-up black hole because it explains how Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) became the maleficent foe to Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobbs.
Though cent’anni is a common Italian toast to 100 years of good health, no one is exactly celebrating the decision to commit Sofia to Arkham State Hospital after she questions her father’s role in her mother’s death. There, Sofia is subjected to relentless amounts of torture, which makes the violence so far on The Penguin seem relatively civilized in comparison. (And it was only supposed to last for six months!)
But no matter how upsetting it was to watch Sofia get repeatedly zapped in shock treatment, it was important for Showrunner Lauren LeFranc to show what turned the Hangman into someone that Oz should fear.
“I really like storytelling that takes a pause on plot and lets you dive deeper into a character. If you’re engaging the audience properly, people should be willing to go on a ride with you,” LeFranc tells Deadline. “It probably felt odd to spend time with Sofia when we’re in a show called The Penguin. But I think it’s just as important so you can understand Oz psychologically. Even though I don’t view Oz as a hero or a villain, he is a greater villain in the show than anyone else. And for you to feel that way, I think you have to understand his primary antagonist more. And that’s Sofia.”
LeFranc brought in actor/director Helen Shaver, whom she worked with on the YouTube Original drama Impulse, to helm the pivotal episode.
“Once I’d read episode four, I was just like, ‘okay, I’m doing this.’ I so understood the journey to the primal trauma and the unraveling of this woman, her rebirth,” says Shaver. “I could make the journey. And Cristin’s commitment to this piece! I’m very fortunate to have all those years of acting, so I really can identify with an actor like her and to be a woman in her mid-thirties in this industry. We found each other and had a great deal of trust in each other. What I knew it needed, which Lauren certainly echoed, was a willingness and an examination of what it would be to be stripped of everything .. to be stripped of the moment when you realize your whole life as you understood it was actually not the truth, that your father killed your mother and then told you not to look. That’s what often happens with trauma is that we bury it deep. So, I knew I wanted the audience to experience what she experienced.”
And while Shaver admits the torture may have appeared “relentless,” she believes the episode did its job in explaining “what is the effect on the human being.”
“That is what moves the audience. It is that truth that hits us, which is undeniable,” explains Slaver. “Otherwise, it is just gratuitous torture, like ‘let’s beat this woman up.’ If we’re going to hit her, there must be a bruise. But the bruise is not just a physical bruise. We want to see the wound and we want to see the recovery from that, or not necessarily the recovery, but the repercussions on what that does to the human.”
For her part, Milioti says she “had the time of my life” shooting “Cent’Anni.”
“It was such a privilege to get to explore those types of things. And Helen was such an incredible lighthouse and guide during all that,” the actress recalls. “I felt like we were in the trenches together. And couple that with Lauren’s brilliant writing, I just felt like it was a real, pinch-me experience. We needed to see Sofia driven mad. She becomes the thing that everyone accused her of being. And then she steps into this different part of herself. Whether or not you agree with what she’s doing, she just sort of lets that power fly. And so in a very twisted way, she’s free.”
