At this week's New York Comic Con, I and a few other reporters had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the cast of The Penguin. Each of them were wonderfully gracious and answered our questions to give more insight into what went into making the show. Below is our conversation with Lauren LeFranc, the showrunner and executive producer. You can see our coverage of the public panel here, as well as our interview with Cristin Milioti, who plays Sophia Falcone.

During the panel you mentioned that you were a big fan of the comics. You started with X-Men and you eventually got into DC with Superman and Batman; were there any comics in particular that helped influence your writing on the show?

For me, I went back to The Long Halloween, Dark Victory -  Pain and Prejudice was a really great comic. I read all the Penguin comics, which I was not very familiar with any of the Penguin, specific ones outside of that until I started to dig into them, but it was great. I mean, for me, it was just inspiring to just take bits and pieces to try to find the tone or the mood. Obviously I know Long Halloween was really inspirational for Matt and for so many people who've taken on the Batman just because of the Noir sort of quality.

I want to ask what I just asked Cristin because she wanted me to refer to you. I want to talk about the stigma in Batman media when it comes to addressing mental illness, and how, with the presence of Arkham Asylum, we tend to villainize people going through these personal struggles, and how the Penguin seems to do a lot of work to subvert that and show that these are real people and that they aren't monsters. I would like to hear what you have to say about the work that you did to overcome that.

That's a great question. I mean, I love comic books, and I've grown up reading them, but there are things when you look back that you're like, that's unfortunate, that's a terrible trope, or that's deeply offensive, and I think we can do better, especially when it comes to our villains. It's easy to say, oh, someone's mentally unwell in broad terms and therefore they're gonna kill you, they're a murderer or something. Similarly, something that we had to contend with in The Penguin, a lot of these characters are drawn with like giant scars on their faces, or you know, Oz has a disability, and some depictions suggest that's why he maybe acts out or does what he does. To me, I'm like, we cannot go down that path. We're more evolved as a society for that. Oz is who he is because of who he is as a man.

So we really strive to showcase all sides of him, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he has a club foot. That is a part of who he is, certainly, and there's a level of pain he lives with, but that is not why he's ambitious, that is not why he's a narcissist. That's separate from that. In terms of Arkham State Hospital, I think it was very important to do as best as we can. Obviously, we take place in Gotham City, we're in a comic book show, there's a certain quality to that that you want to embrace, but at the same time, I just think there's room to showcase mental illness and show it's much more complicated than it has been depicted previously. We're trying for that certainly and we're very aware of it.

As you mentioned earlier, some of the inspirations for this particular series is Tim Sale and Jeff Loeb's Dark Victory and Long Halloween. But were there any other inspirations for certain depictions of characters within the series? Or was it just more of taking the ball that was already established in The Batman and just running with it with your own interpretation? How did you balance between various interpretations and events and the fantastical elements as well?

I tried to take inspiration from real people, or literary figures in some moments, just not have everything come from the comics. So, Oz for instance, I attributed a lot of who I thought of him to Buddy Cianci, who was the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island for 21 years. I went to school in Providence and so I was familiar with him. He was in prison when I was there, and he was re-elected after prison. He had his own pasta sauce and he had his own radio show after prison, and he was this charming, affable guy, who was also very violent and despicable in a lot of his actions, and definitely was extremely corrupt, but people loved him because he took care of them.

And so Oz's story in the first episode, when he talks about Rex Calabrese, that's sort of my homage to Buddy Cianci and what that guy embodied for me as an inspiration. I try to do things like that, where I read as much as I possibly can, I research, I watch documentaries, I read books on different like mob figures and just the criminal world in general. Then I try to make something that feels cohesive to me in this world.

What made you decide on casting Cristin as Sofia?

I've been a huge fan of Cristin's work for a long time. I think, even though everyone knows she's so tremendous, she still remains somehow this underrated actor that people just don't expect what she always does and what she always delivers, which is shocking to me. It was really exciting because she has such range. I mean, she's a theater actor first and foremost, which a lot of people don't know, you know, obviously she's a great singer. She was in Once the musical, and she just has great dramatic chops, but then she's been cast recently in all these great films and television shows that have like a dark sense of humor to them, but I know she can do so much more and she has so much gravitas.

I was just excited by the possibility of having her become our Sophia, because I wanted a Sophia that could be cutting with her humor. Like could bring a level of genuine humor, but Cristin's also such a likable person, and so it's more surprising in a way, the darkness that's within her. She blows me away in this show, and I'm so excited for her because I think people are really starting to see the tremendous range she's always had. We brought her in and she did a chemistry read with Colin just to make sure that those two vibed and it was really exciting. It was awesome. They they read the scene at lunch in the first episode together and seeing Sophia come to life in that way through Cristin was the best.

A lot is made of the fact that again, this is a Batman show without Batman. It's more like a crime drama and you said you read a lot of Batman comic books, so as a creator making a superhero show where there exists this stigma against superhero stuff, even if it's making tons of money, what would you want your audience's big takeaway to be from watching this show?

I want them to care about our characters. To me, it doesn't matter as much at the end of the day if there's no Batman in a show that was spun off of The Batman if you deeply care about these people. You might care by hating them, you might be repulsed by them, you might be rooting for them, you might just at least deeply understand them in a different way. To me, that's what is so great about television is having the time to spend with characters and you want your audience to grow with them. So the most essential thing to me is creating characters that you have some sort of connection with so that if something terrible happens to them, for instance, you care. Or something, great happens to them, you feel like it's triumphant for yourself. You know that's the goal. And so in any genre I think that's the case.

I know we veer more crime drama because no one has superpowers in our show, and I know we're over saturated and there's so many different iterations that have been done time and again of different superhero content. I watch all of them, like I'm a huge fan for all of that stuff. So the best thing, too, about this genre is that some people love something and some people don't love something and that's okay, there's so much of it. So I would be hesitant that we'd stop making some of that stuff. I think just the priority at least for me as a creator is making sure you're filling the world with interesting, complex people we can all feel something for on some level.

Can I ask you another question about the mental illness aspect? The other angle that this show addresses is, the dementia story things with Francis, which is something the comics touch on. But you can really explore very deeply in these eight episodes. It feels like it comes from a very personal place.

I mean, I thought it was interesting to dig into dementia in this show, and I did research trying to figure out what would be the correct sort of thing to engage in to tell the stories that I wanted to tell. I researched Lewy Body dementia which is a terrible terrible disease and I think it's actually what people believe Robin Williams had. So it's very confusing to diagnose. It's often misdiagnosed as Parkinson's because people have tremors, they lose their sense of balance, and then unfortunately people will give people medication for that that actually doesn't help them.

For me, I always bring some sort of like personal quality to bring some kind of personal connection to all the things I write, and all the characters that I create. Not always literally, but I think it's so relatable. A lot of people have had different experiences with someone who has had dementia; dementia is very common, but this specific form people have hallucinations and it's very confusing and you can be with someone very present in one second, and the very next be different. There was something about that that felt interesting to engage with, for Francis.

The Penguin obviously fits as a kind of bridge between The Batman movie and the upcoming sequel. How much freedom did you feel like you had in creating your own show, versus how much were you tied into bridging the gap between those two movies that were more outside of your control?

I actually felt like I had a lot of freedom, because we decided to make our show very intimate and very focused on our characters. We weren't trying to bring in a ton of different people from the universe, and we weren't trying to add a character in only to service them to move into Matt's second film. I think that if we are successful, it's partly because of that. We weren't just a show to fit in different characters and then figure out how we're gonna do it. It's like, no, this is the emotional trajectory of this man. This is a psychological character study of him and all the people around him and I hope by the end of eight hours you start to think about our own characters, some of whom are new newly created or definitely different enough from the comics that we previous established that you feel like "I can't stop thinking about these people, and now, they're my favorite comic book character and maybe people write more comics about them". That's my hope anyway. So I was given a lot of freedom and I'm so grateful to Matt for that.

Stay tuned for more Batman News coverage of NYCC, including interviews, news, and panels.