How ‘The Penguin’ recast Carmine Falcone for a pivotal episode

Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Penguin episode 4.

Sofia Falcone gets her origin story on The Penguin, and naturally it involves dear old dad.

Mobster Carmine Falcone was last seen in 2022’s The Batman by way of actor John Turturro. The Riddler (Paul Dano) took out the patriarch of the Falcone criminal enterprise, a death that sparked the key power struggle currently playing out on The Penguin. With this week’s debut of episode 4, Carmine returns in flashback, only this time he has a new face. Mark Strong, a veteran of the DC universe from 2019’s Shazam! and that often-lampooned Green Lantern movie from 2011, now takes over the role.

Showrunner Lauren LeFranc speaks with Entertainment Weekly about recasting the part once it was clear that Turturro’s schedule would conflict with production and weaving Carmine into Sofia’s origin story.

“Initially, did we want to be able to have John come back and be Carmine Falcone? Of course,” she says. “John’s a really talented actor and was exceptional in the film, but once we realized that his schedule wasn’t going to work out for our show, it became quickly about who has that sort of gravitas and ferociousness, that Mark Strong actually does have. It was really exciting to see how those scenes turned out because he was so seminal to Sofia’s story. We certainly weren’t going to not have Carmine in our story. We very specifically plotted Sofia’s arc to be interwoven with Carmine’s arc, as well.”

Episode 4 cuts back and forth between the present, when the remaining Falcones attempt to push Sofia out of the family business entirely, and the past, when she was once Carmine’s favored child and heir to his empire. Once daddio learns Sofia met with a reporter investigating a series of killings he committed, Carmine does not show his daughter any favoritism in exacting retribution. The mob boss orders the reporter killed and frames Sofia for all of the murders, with the press falsely nicknaming her “the Hangman.” Thus begins a traumatic spiral in Arkham State Hospital, where Sofia is subjected to electroshock therapy and harsh living conditions.

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LeFranc’s team wanted some continuity between Strong and Turturro’s performances of Carmine, but she recognizes that the Carmine of The Penguin is “a younger version.”

“They’re similar ages, but a little bit younger,” she says. “You’d have to ask Mark, but I think he did look at the portrayal and the accent [in The Batman]. I keep using the word gravitas, but it was very important that he has a presence, certainly with Sofia, that there’s a hint of warmth, but also something very cold at his center. It felt cohesive to me in watching him. It felt to me like that is her father.”

When writing the relationship between Carmine and Sofia, LeFranc became inspired by the true story of Rosemary Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy’s sister who received a lobotomy at the age of 23 at the behest of her father. “It’s unclear how mentally ill she was or if she just did things that they felt were inappropriate and made the Kennedys look bad,” the scribe remarks. That tends to be how LeFranc works: she’s not just trying to unlock who the character of Sofia is, but also identify the pertinent societal conversations that might relate. “We’re digging deeper into who she is and why she is the way she is, but at the same time acknowledging flaws in our institutions, for instance, and the power that some men hold over young women,” LeFrance explains. “Who has a voice and who doesn’t? Whose voice is silenced?”

Thanks to Carmine’s silencing of Sofia, she is now silencing a lot more Falcones in the present. Like father, like daughter.