“It’s a rise to power story on some level for Oz, so I knew generally where I needed to leave him as a character,” LeFranc says of The Penguin‘s relationship to The Batman. “But then really the beauty of it is that I had a lot of freedom within that to play. Matt [Reeves, director of The Batman] was really gracious about saying, ‘Yeah, you can create new canon.’”
That new canon comes across in Sofia’s self-actualizing in the wake of her father’s dethroning, which complicates Oz’s own machinations.
“For me, the most important and essential thing in any story, no matter if you’re between two films or anything, is the characters,” LeFranc says. “Making sure that you do the work to have the characters feel alive and rich and complicated, that you have backstory for them, whether you fully see it or not on screen, and that you know where they’re emotionally going.”
The main drive of Sofia’s story is summarized beautifully in a surprising scene from episode three in which she and Oz try to convince the boss of Gotham’s Triads to distribute a new drug called Bliss. To ease the boss’s trepidation, Sofia gives a speech about the psychological need that drives every person and how the people of Gotham experiencing pain from everything they’ve lost have become desperate. Sofia may be gesturing toward teens dancing on a club floor, trying to get over the devastation the Riddler wrought in The Batman, but she’s really talking about herself.
“That speech is kind of a weirdly vulnerable moment for her,” Milioti explains. “She’s in a very unsafe environment, not just the club, but with Oz near all of it. She knows how people look at her when she walks in a room.”
Sofia’s ability to use that vulnerability and surprise those who would underestimate her makes her a formidable opponent to Oz and a larger threat to Gotham City in general. And, for Milioti, it’s what makes Sofia fit within the world of Batman.