Cristin Milioti

Cristin Milioti is an American actress and musician born on August 16, 1985, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. She is of Italian descent and graduated from Cherry Hill High School East in 2003, where she began performing in school plays. She later took acting classes at New York University before leaving during her sophomore year. Her earliest professional work included bit parts in national advertising campaigns, among them a spot for the Ford Edge, as well as small television appearances on The Sopranos and film work including Greetings from the Shore.

Milioti's Broadway career spans 2006 to 2012. In 2007, she appeared on Broadway as Alice Ashbrook in Coram Boy, Helen Edmundson's adaptation of Jamila Gavin's novel. She also appeared on Broadway in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Her most prominent stage role came in the musical Once, in which she played the Girl from 2011 to 2013. The performance earned her a 2012 Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical. Her work in Once, recorded alongside fellow principal soloist Steve Kazee, also earned the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Off Broadway, Milioti starred in That Face in 2010 and received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress for her work in Stunning. In 2012, she contributed vocals to several tracks on Glen Hansard's debut album Rhythm and Repose, and in 2011 she read a short story for a This American Life episode titled "Adventure."

In 2013, Milioti was cast in the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother as Tracy McConnell, the titular Mother, first appearing in the season eight finale and becoming a series regular for the show's ninth and final season. That same year, she portrayed Teresa Petrillo, Jordan Belfort's first wife, in Martin Scorsese's film The Wolf of Wall Street. In 2014, she was cast as Zelda, the female lead in NBC's comedy series A to Z, which ran for one season of thirteen episodes. The following year, she joined the second season of FX's anthology crime series Fargo, playing Betsy Solverson, the cancer-stricken wife of state trooper Lou Solverson.

In 2017, Milioti appeared in the fourth season of the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror, playing Nanette Cole in the episode "USS Callister." She reprised the role in the 2025 seventh season episode "USS Callister: Into Infinity." Her 2020 film Palm Springs, a science fiction comedy, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before streaming on Hulu. From 2021 to 2022, she starred in the HBO Max dark comedy series Made for Love as a woman who escapes her marriage to a tech billionaire, and in 2022 she appeared in the Peacock comedy mystery series The Resort.

Milioti's performance as Sofia Falcone in the 2024 HBO crime drama series The Penguin, a spin-off of The Batman opposite Colin Farrell, brought her significant recognition. For that role she won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Movie/Miniseries and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, and received a Golden Globe Award nomination.