Oz has always wanted this one specific thing, and all he can see is that she had it and he didn’t.

Right. Yeah. And he has to rationalize to himself what he does. He really is a narcissist, and he constructs his own view of the world to his benefit, always.

Your job was to lay out an origin story for the Penguin, but the show is really two origin stories: Oz Cobb’s and Sofia—do I say Falcone or Gigante?

You better say Gigante or you’re in trouble.

Sofia Gigante, then. She is someone who is really made into who she is: an innocent person confined to an asylum for 10 years, essentially driven mad. But when we see Oz as a kid, he’s already who he’s going to be, a child who will allow his two brothers to die so he can have more of his mother’s attention. His mother might not be quite right in the finale when she calls him “the devil,” but she’s not all wrong.

I think you could argue there’s many other ways for Sofia to move forward in her life. The path she chooses coming out of Arkham is very self-destructive. It’s empowering in some ways too, but by the end, she comes to this realization that she’s still playing, as she says in Episode 7, by her father’s rules. It’s this game. And it’s a game that Oz knows very, very well too. She’s still trying to prove to her father that she has value. Why is she spending her time doing that? Is this something she even wants? Certainly she wants power, but does she need or want power on this level, and does this give her strength? It isn’t quite healing for her.

Cristin Miloti plays the moment when she realizes what Oz has done so well. You have a moment of relief when you realize he hasn’t killed her, but when the cops show up to take her back to Arkham, the look on her face is so clearly “Anything but this.”

It’s gut-wrenching. That’s the hope, really, even though that sounds terrible to say. I really have always viewed this show as a tragedy in a way, one that I hope is engaging and enthralling and funny in moments. But at the end of the day, we’re trying to have it feel a bit operatic.

Can you talk about what you wanted to achieve with Sofia more broadly? In the comics, she’s a serial killer called the Hangman, and on The Penguin, people think she is, but she’s actually been framed by the real killer, who is her father. So if people just know the comics, or even if they skimmed the Wiki, they’re going to be surprised by how you turn that inside-out.

Carmine Falcone’s death in the film led to a power vacuum in our show, and that was the main thing that I knew: Oz was taking advantage of a power vacuum. So when it came to thinking about adversaries for Oz, I thought Sofia would be a really interesting person to bring into the fold. I wanted this interesting brother–sister relationship at its center, and I wanted a really interesting, complex, flawed female character. I mean, I wanted many of them. There’s some tropes in comic books and crime dramas, and they don’t always serve female characters as well as they might men. So I really wanted to try to subvert those tropes and just add more dimension in the way that I wished I had when I was a kid growing up, and that as a woman now, I would still love. I can’t say I love Oz, because I really find him very difficult to write, especially towards the end. He’s really an appalling character in a lot of ways. But he speaks so many truths that I personally connect to as well, and he’s a really amazing character to get the opportunity to write. I don’t think people like me are given a lot of opportunities like that, in terms of writing a muscular type of character.

“There’s so many people like Oz in our world who hold a lot of power, who also connect with people because they speak, on some level, the truth.”

When it came to Sofia and her story specifically, I was interested in Rosemary Kennedy. I thought it was so tragic what happened to her and how her father—who obviously came from a very patriarchal household and a very wealthy family—had the power to put her away. She was 23, and she was given a lobotomy, and her story’s never told. So I wanted to see if I could tell a Rosemary Kennedy–esque story, and also flip on its head the comic-book tradition of how everyone who comes from Arkham is a psychopath. It felt exciting and fun to me to lead the audience down a path of all these preconceived notions of what we think of someone who comes from Arkham, but also how common it is to label women as insane. I mean, you can look at people like Britney Spears, for instance. Mental institutions used to do these terrible things to women, and women would be deemed hysterical and be thrown into an institution. That wasn’t that long ago.

While we’re talking about great actresses and complicated women: You got to create Oz’s mom, Francis, played by Deirdre O’Connell, essentially from scratch. What went into that character for you?

What little of Oz I knew was based on the movie, because he’s not in very many scenes. I got to read the script early, which was really helpful and informative, and I was thinking about, OK, if I’m going to take on this series about Oz, I need for my own self to understand where he comes from, who he comes from, why he is the way he is, what makes him tick, what he fears, what he wants, all that. In the comics, Oz’s mother, in various forms, plays a prominent role, but I wanted to create my own version of who his mother would be, and so I created Francis. What I liked about her is that she is a ballsy woman, she is brash, and they have this strange connection. I always imagined that as a woman of her generation, she was overlooked herself. She was not given the opportunity or the respect that someone like her felt like she deserved. Circumstances didn’t allow her to succeed and make a better life for herself in the way that she dreamed of. And yet, here’s her son, who she believes can do that for her, and should do that for her.

In “Top Hat,” the flashback episode, we see she was always brash. She always talked the way she does, but she loved her sons deeply, all three of them. And the revelation we come to in the finale where we realize that she always knew what Oz had done, and she’s been sitting with that … I mean, the two of them are quite terrible at closure. They don’t talk about their feelings. If anything, this show could be an example of one of the many reasons people should explore therapy—but not the therapy that Julian Rush does on Sofia, because that’s also very bad.

On your Twitter account, you link to an article you wrote for the Rumpus about growing up with a girl who was killed by her mother, and being afraid that your own mother might hurt you. Did that play into creating a character like Francis, who we eventually find out came very close to having her own son killed?

Well, I do always try to bring my personal experience. The best thing you can do as a writer is try to live an interesting life and talk to other people who live interesting, very different lives than you. I definitely had an interesting one, and I am interested in trauma for a lot of reasons.

In so many ways, actually, I based Francis on my grandmother, my dad’s mother, and she’s a very different woman. She came from Mexico and immigrated to the United States, but was very prideful and very challenging as a mother to my dad. And yet she would never speak like Francis. I mean, Francis speaks the way she does because that’s Oz’s mom and I wanted you to know that Oz gets his mouth from a woman like her. My grandmother would be appalled if she knew that I would ever associate the two of them together, because she really viewed herself as quite classy.

In the last scene, Oz is dancing with Eve (Carmen Ejogo), who looks so much like his mother that it made me wonder if I’d been missing it the rest of the season.

That’s very, very intentional. With Eve, we established that she becomes who her clients want her to be. The woman that we met early in the season was who Oz wanted her to be and what she looks like for Oz. When Sofia finds her in her apartment, this is who she actually is. She’s not wearing a wig. She’s not dressed up or dolled up. She looks really different. She has no makeup on.

It was always important to me, and this was always part of my initial pitch, that if Oz was to achieve a level of power—and that is something that was not up for discussion, that was my job that I was tasked with for the season—that he has to lose something emotionally.
It can’t come without a cost. Some of the costs involve his own choosing, like Victor, and Francis, how she loses her mental capacities by the end and realizes her greatest fear. Oz does not give her the things he promises, one of which is to help her die and release her from the sort of mental prison that she’s feared, because she, in his mind, betrayed him and didn’t ever tell him she was proud of him—and in fact, calls him the devil and wounds him. That’s the last thing he gets from his mother, which is the antithesis of everything that he’s wanted or demanded or felt like he deserved.

So it made a lot of sense that Eve, who is someone who he pays to do what he wants and to say what he wants, that he would have her dress up like his mother in a distorted way and tell him she’s proud of him in the way that his mother never did, wearing the dress that we establish in the second episode, and we see again in seven and eight. That’s something that Francis wore to the jazz club that night when, unbeknownst to Oz, she was considering having Rex kill him.

Which, up until Episode 8, he’d always thought was a great night.

In his mind, he was like, “Oh, what a special night. We celebrated my brothers, but they’re gone now, and I get my mom all to myself.” And Francis, we realize, is considering having someone who Oz looks up to as his mentor take him out. Our show’s a tragedy, and I want it to be distorted and weird, but I also hope that we’ve laid the groundwork for you to see that Oz is a man who creates his own delusions. With Eve, it’s to the extreme, but that is how he reconciles his own decisions, and that is how he gets what he wants, no matter if it’s completely true or not.

The Penguin ends up not just establishing Oz as a formidable foe for the Batman, but as a genuinely horrifying person, not a comic-book villain. He’s not someone who is going to carry out some elaborate plot against the people of Gotham so much as someone you would not want to be in the room with.