Years Before The Penguin, Cristin Milioti Appeared In Another HBO Crime Drama

Back when Cristin Milioti got her breakout TV role on "How I Met Your Mother," little about her performance screamed "mob boss." Milioti's character was pleasant, unthreatening, and very much not the sort of woman to commit multiple mass-homicides. With Trudy (AKA the Mother) as Milioti's main claim to fame, most fans of "The Penguin" found her dark character, Sofia Falcone, a pleasant surprise. Milioti's performance as the tightly-wound, rarely-blinking mafia menace was riveting, something we didn't know Milioti had in her. 

But for hardcore fans of "The Sopranos," it wasn't that surprising. Before Milioti played the troubled daughter of an infamous crime boss on "The Penguin," she was playing Catherine Sacrimoni, the troubled daughter of crime boss Johnny Sack. It wasn't a major role, but she was still given more of a presence than you'd expect.

Throughout season 6, Milioti's Catherine is presented as the odd one out in her family. She rarely seems all that happy to be in the room, and at one point, she snaps at the family for only ever talking about food. (And after six seasons of these characters talking constantly about pasta and gabagool, someone had to say it!) She seems to be the Meadow Soprano of the Sacrimoni family, the one who is mostly disillusioned with their crime-funded lifestyle and wants to start her own thing outside it. Despite all this, Catherine is still sad to see her father succumb to lung cancer in the final season. Milioti may not have been the main focus in Sack's death scene, but her performance in it made clear that she was going to be a star. 

When she landed the role, Milioti was a freshman in college at New York University. In a recent interview with Variety, she talked about how she was strongly considering dropping out of school to pursue acting full-time, but it was only when she booked this role that she felt brave enough to do it. "I was accruing debt and frustrated and excitable and eager," she explained. "I got that job and then was like, 'OK, I can drop out.'"

What helped was that her first episode on the show, "Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request," was directed by none other than Steve Buscemi. (Yes, Buscemi is also a director.) "Steve Buscemi was so kind," Milioti recalled. "It can be really easy to get lost in the shuffle, and he treated me like I was just as important as someone who'd been on the show for years."

The craziest part of Milioti's "Sopranos" role was that she hadn't even seen the show before she was cast, or even during her time in production. She apparently didn't even know the series was a massive cultural phenomenon throughout the 2000s, but that might've been for the best. As she told Variety:

"I hadn't seen it because we couldn't afford HBO. I was already really nervous just because that was such a big set, and I didn't know how sets worked. If I'd known how significant that show is, I would've been a mess."