Cristin Milioti talks with BuzzFeed on how she went from The Sopranos , 30 Rock , and the Broadway musical Once to the most highly prized role in a network comedy in years. And how, along the way, she (almost) made out with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Cristin Milioti as the Mother on How I Met Your Mother
When Cristin Milioti made her debut as the Mother on the eighth season finale of CBS' How I Met Your Mother, she made headlines across the world. But other than fans of Broadway (where Milioti was nominated for a Tony last year for her leading role in the musical Once), and NBC's 30 Rock (where Milioti made a lasting impression as a "sexy baby" comedienne), the 28-year-old actress remains largely an unknown. To most HIMYM fans, in fact, she is simply just the Mother.
Within her first week in Los Angeles to shoot the ninth and final season of HIMYM, however, Milioti nearly gained notoriety for something else entirely.
"I was almost arrested for drunk driving," she says.
Milioti recently sat down with me for her first wide-ranging interview since landing the one of most highly anticipated roles in television. A dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, with enormous, expressive eyes and a natural amiability, she was still adjusting to life as a Los Angeles driver, including navigating the city's byzantine street parking signs. "I got four parking tickets my first week," she says with a laugh. "I mean, I can read. I can speak English fairly well. But I got very confused by the poles with the five different [parking] signs on them. I got a ticket right in front of my house, because I didn't see the street sweeping [sign]. Another time, I didn't turn my wheels [on a hill]. I didn't even know about the wheel turning!"
And then there was the evening when Milioti was driving at 15 miles per hour in her brand-new Mini Cooper on Fountain Avenue, trying to find her friend's street after a partaking of a local sushi bar. "I was stone-cold sober," she says. "I got flagged into a DUI checkpoint. And then I couldn't figure out how to open the window, because I had just gotten the car, like, an hour before. So they thought I was drunk. I failed all the sobriety tests, because I have terrible balance and I couldn't stop laughing, like crying laughing. They made me take two Breathalyzers because they didn't believe me, and I blew a 0.00. Apparently, my pupils in their resting state look like someone who's twice the legal limit. It was a really traumatic first few hours."
When I ask if she was ever worried about TMZ showing up, she looks at me as if I'd asked if she'd ever seen a Cockamouse. "No. I mean, not at all," she says. "They would be like, 'Small, Vampire-Looking Young Man Is Pulled Over. No One Cares!'"
After HIMYM's two-part season premiere on Sept. 23, however, a lot more people are going to care about Cristin Milioti. To give you a head start, here are 10 things about her you need to know now.
1. She went to New York University to study acting — and quickly dropped out — but her real passion is music.
Steve Kazee and Christin Milioti at the Broadway opening night of Once on March 18, 2012.
Brad Barket / Getty Images
Milioti grew up in a New Jersey exurb of Philadelphia, where she would go with friends "to smoke Capri Slims and walk around with hemp necklaces on." She performed in high school plays, saw her first Broadway show at 16, and decided to study acting at NYU — but she dropped out within a year. "I was so unhappy there," she says. "There were, like, 30 kids in acting class; half of them weren't even theater majors. I just was really itching to get out and do stuff, and I think I also had done really poor research. Like, I didn't know there was a place like Juilliard. I think that's what I thought [NYU was like] — you just do acting all day. This was like, you take, hard classes, in subjects I wasn't prepared for — which I actually wish I paid more attention to."
In point of fact, Milioti says she's actually been singing far longer than she's ever thought about pursuing acting as a career. "I've sung for way longer than I've acted," she says. "I sang in bands all throughout high school and loved it." Her father, who runs an IT business, had worked as a recording studio engineer, and always had music playing in the house, even at breakfast. "He introduced me to Adele. Like, he knows things before anyone. He's really plugged into that world."
But as Milioti's theater career began to take off in New York — first with a production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2006, followed largely by a series of off-Broadway plays — there was one arena Milioti struggled to break into. "I auditioned for musicals and no one would have me," she says. "I couldn't get called back for a musical to save my life. The closest I ever got was Spider-Man." That all changed when she booked the lead role of The Girl in the Broadway adaptation of 2007 indie-folk musical sensation Once. "That's the style of music that I really love."
