1.
It was not unlike the way The Sopranos ended, in Holsten’s ice cream parlor in Bloomfield, New Jersey: One minute Tony’s changing the jukebox to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” waiting for his daughter, Meadow, to join the rest of the family for onion rings. And then, fade to black.
Only this time, the restaurant was in a five-star hotel in Rome, built on third-century Roman ruins across the street from a church Michelangelo designed for the last intact ancient tepidarium, in the Baths of Diocletian. James Gandolfini was in Italy with his son, Michael, on vacation. They’d arrived on the twelve-hour flight from Los Angeles the night before, and had just had “a beautiful day” sightseeing. Jim told friends he’d been looking forward to a “boys’ trip,” where he and Michael, thirteen, could explore their Italian heritage together—it was something Tony Soprano had said he wanted to do after touring Naples in the second season, let his kids see “all this stuff they come from.”
In the afternoon, he took Michael to the Vatican. He bought a couple of rosaries for his sisters, blessed by Pope Francis and promising indulgences, the proceeds dedicated to the convent that works for Rome’s poor. Then they went to the Musei Vaticani to see, among much else, the mummies and sarcophagi in the Ancient Egyptian galleries. They were photographed there standing between two illustrated coffin lids by a pair of American tourists from Philadelphia.
They left the Vatican in the middle of one of those Roman afternoons in June when the rooflines waver in the sun and the fountain spray evaporates before it hits the pool. They were waiting for James’s sister Leta, who was arriving from Paris that night after meetings with her dress company, American Rag. They were going to enjoy a few days in the curving Boscolo Hotel Exedra on the Piazza della Repubblica until Jim made a scheduled appearance at the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily, where he’d do an appearance with an old castmate, Marisa Tomei.
It was just James and Michael that night in the hotel’s outdoor restaurant, still trying to get past the jet lag and fall into sync with Italian time. They ate, lingered over drinks and dessert, and started drifting up to their room around 9:00 P.M.
And then, fade to black.
At least, that’s how it felt to many. Michael found his father on the floor of the bathroom in their suite at around ten that night and called the desk for help. An emergency crew from the nearby Policlinico Umberto I was there in minutes; Gandolfini was still alive, even as they wheeled him, bare-chested and wrapped in a hotel blanket, out through the lobby. He died at the hospital of cardiac arrest, after continuous resuscitation efforts, forty minutes later. He was fifty-one years old.
At first, the world reacted the way so many had to the end of The Sopranos—with absolute shock. Then the cascade of regrets, well-wishes, and sorrow for an actor who made millions sympathize with a stone-cold killer for almost ten years, becoming part of the American family. Everyone expected many more years, and many more characters, each one subtly reshaping the working-class hero he’d become—such as Enough Said, a romantic comedy with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for Fox Searchlight, expected for 2014 (the company would put it into quick turnaround after Gandolfini’s death), about a woman who falls in love with her friend’s husband. Slowly, the realization sunk in that this fade-out meant something else—there would be no Sopranos movie.
Ever since “Don’t Stop Believin’” went into its last verse in that Bloomfield ice cream parlor, every fan of The Sopranos had been asking when their favorite mob family would get its big-budget, Godfather-type, silver-screen treatment, as if that would somehow be better. Gandolfini had been asked about it just a few days before he took off for Rome, by a TMZ paparazzo on a Los Angeles sidewalk, and he’d answered that he had no idea. The only time, he said, he was sure it would get made was when “David Chase runs out of money.”
Even that won’t be enough to get it made now, because there is no Sopranos without Tony Soprano. James Gandolfini’s creation, from 1999–2007, of the lugubrious mob boss with such mother problems that he starts seeing a female therapist, became one of the most indelibly mythic characters of American television. Tony was a kind of cross between Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, a raging id of greed and lust who could make you laugh at the clumsiness of his surgically precise malapropisms. Tony was “with that Senator Sanitorium” on the issue of gay rights; he could be “prostate with grief”; revenge, he believed, was “like serving cold cuts.”
And yet, Tony was not a buffoon. Or anyway, not just a buffoon. Something in the alchemy of Gandolfini’s performance made Tony very real to millions of Americans and fans around the world. So real that James Gandolfini’s death seemed as if it had happened to a neighbor, or a relative. His death was all in the family.
And at the same time, it was Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The Shield, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Justified. James Gandolfini was one of those actors who changed the medium in which they performed. It’s often said that he introduced an era of TV antiheroes. What he definitely did was show us a bad man who hurt other people out of his own vulnerabilities. As America went around serving cold cuts to the rest of the world after 9/11 (the Twin Towers fell within sight of some of the scenes in The Sopranos’ famous opening credits), and its rusting middle-class economy barreled toward decline and collapse, that theme seemed to take on an importance far beyond TV itself.
* * *
To understand James Gandolfini, it’s important to know that all roads lead to Rome—but they start in New Jersey. Where your birthplace can be an exit ramp.
“A large number of actors and musicians are from [New Jersey],” Gandolfini once told The New York Times. “We are overrepresented in the culture. You have a blue-collar, middle-class sensibility right next to one of the greatest cities in the world, which can make for some interesting creative impulses.”
Like, maybe, the impulse to take a baseball bat to polite culture, or the impulse to grab pleasure hard, or just the impulse to give in to your impulses. People forget, but it’s no accident that Roy Lichtenstein invented Pop Art while he was teaching at Rutgers, or that Bruce Springsteen was mourning the death of the American Dream before the media across the river realized it was sick. The state’s greatest poet, William Carlos Williams, was an obstetrician serving poor, immigrant, working-class families in Paterson from a horse and buggy.
And Snooki is a real person.
The tight braiding of banality and art was The Sopranos’ signature. At a time when most scripted TV shows were still shot on soundstages in Los Angeles or gussied up with exotic locales, The Sopranos featured video shoots on city street corners, in the Meadowlands swamp, at mall parking lots—it looked like it was shot out of your car window. When the audience watched Tony’s crew threaten to toss a persuadable civilian off the bridge over the Great Falls in Paterson, folks around the country saw a dramatically dark and craggy waterfall, but Jerseyans saw a place they’d all trooped through on school day-trips.
The show’s creator, David Chase, is himself a son of New Jersey, with his own complicated relationship to his Italian heritage and his home state. Back in the late 1970s, when Chase was starting out, he produced a genial but often topical private-eye show starring James Garner called The Rockford Files. He wrote an episode titled “Just a Coupla Guys,” about aspiring Italian-American mobsters from New Jersey who would stand out like black socks on a beach in L.A. It said a lot, even then, about the sour state of mind his native state puts David Chase in.
The plot had Garner landing at Newark airport as a fellow passenger tells him how nice the city really is, that it’s gotten an unfair rap. In short order, after getting off the plane, Rockford’s watch, luggage, and rental car are stolen, and a little later the character is mugged on the street. The easy freedom of the California lifestyle and American abundance seem suspicious in a Jersey setting, like some kind of con. The germ of the mob comedy that The Sopranos would become was in a line spoken by the dead-eyed wannabe hitman (played by Greg Antonacci) to Garner: “I hate you guys with your convertibles and your cheeseburgers.” The new suburbia was ruining America for the mob.
Native New Jerseyans have a sort of sad-sack, also-ran, second-rate phobia as their birthright, because they live on the wrong side of the river from Manhattan. It’s a bit of a jinx, like the little raincloud over Al Capp’s Joe Btfsplk. When David Chase finally got his mob comedy on the air at HBO, it was incredibly annoying that so many people assumed it was a knock-off of the Robert De Niro/Billy Crystal vehicle, Analyze This, which opened earlier the same year. Like The Sopranos, Analyze This was a comedy about a mob boss in therapy, only this time he’s a New York kingpin who grows dependent on his nebbishy Jewish shrink and needs to consult him in moments of unexpected crisis.
Cue the laughing trombones. In real life, Chase’s wife, Denise, had been telling him to make a movie about his tortured relationship with his Italian-American mother in Jersey for years. Chase had been steadily pitching the idea of an Italian mob boss trying to cope with his mom and suburban assimilation before HBO signed on, and before Harold Ramis got a green-light for Analyze This.
It’s like a conspiracy: nobody from Jersey ever gets credit for nothin’. Especially if they’re Italian.
And yet, they’re proud of it. It’s just the strangest thing, that New Jerseyans believe this wellspring of bitterness and disappointment allows them to see the truth clearer, unblinkingly, while the rest of the world goes around seeing blue skies and opportunity everywhere. It’s a kind of moral superiority. A kind, of course, that is in no way dented by stealing your watch.
As The Sopranos took off and drew a global audience, the intertwining of fact and fiction became even tighter. Chase hired actors from an A-list of tri-state–area Italian-American actors who, over many years and many productions, had become a kind of repertory theater of big-city mobsters for Hollywood. But he hired a lot of near-amateur actors from Jersey as well, to add local color. Several of them happened to get arrested during the series, for misdemeanors and felonies. Assault, drug possession, insurance fraud, hiring someone to beat a man for not paying a debt, even second-degree murder charges were leveled against Sopranos actors. Robert Iler, who played A.J., Tony’s son on the show, was arrested and pleaded guilty to mugging a pair of Brazilian tourists. The press loved these stories—it was life imitates art.
But the main claim The Sopranos laid to Jersey authenticity and art was Tony himself, or really, James Gandolfini. Like Tony, Gandolfini was born and raised in the Garden State. His father was born in Italy, outside of Milan, and his mother was born in New Jersey but raised near Naples. They spoke Italian in the home, though not to their kids.
Jim and his two sisters, Leta and Johanna, never learned Italian, but Jim said he could tell when his parents “were mad at me” in Italian.
His family had followed the great migration from Newark to the suburbs that began in the late 1950s, all the way out to Park Ridge, in Bergen County. James Joseph Gandolfini, Sr., was a World War II veteran, with a Purple Heart to show for it, despite his Italian birth. He became a bricklayer and cement mixer who wound up head custodian of Paramus Catholic High School. Jimmy Gandolfini’s mother, Santa, was a school lunch lady. His father would set up loudspeakers outside the house every summer and mow the lawn in his boxers to the accompaniment of blaring Italian songs. “He was a real Guinea,” his son recalled.
And maybe it was the vast conspiracy—against Italians from New Jersey, against big guys with big personalities, against the working class—that made Gandolfini reluctant to ever talk about this rich personal life, so intimately bound up with his greatest artistic creation, in public. He rarely gave interviews to the press.
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” he told one of the few journalists he would open up to, The Star-Ledger’s Matt Zoller Seitz, in 1999. “It’s not that I’m afraid to reveal personal stuff.… It’s just that I really, genuinely don’t see why people would find that sort of thing so interesting.”
He’d interrupt journalists who asked about him by saying “Boriiiing!” and try to change the subject. For an actor who appeared so unguarded on the screen or stage, his reticence about his background seemed like a mystery.
And yet, he acknowledged several times that he’d made Tony up out of his own biography. “The character is a good fit,” Gandolfini said. “Obviously, I’m not a mobster, and there’s other aspects of the guy I’m not familiar with, like how comfortable he is with violence. But in most of the ways that count, I have to say, yeah—the guy is me.”
How he got that across on the home screen was a private matter, however. Like a lot of serious dramatic actors, he hated the froufrou and flattery of publicity and promotion. That stuff seemed to eat away at his self-esteem, rather than buck it up (in that he was again like Brando, and a lot of other tough-guy male leads, including Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin). There was something that kept him from wholeheartedly accepting his celebrity or the privileges it could command.
Well, some of them. The ones that weren’t, you know, Jerseyan.
Vanity Fair once asked him about what it was like to go from being working class to international celebrity wealth (he left an estate valued in the press at anywhere from $6 million to $70 million at his death). Gandolfini mulled the question, hemmed and hawed. “Money is good! So I’m very happy about that,” he announced at last. “All the fuss during The Sopranos really was pretty ridiculous. None of us expected it to last, and it lasted almost ten years. Honestly? I don’t think I’m that different. I’ve lived in the same apartment for years. I’ve kept a lot of the same friends. I’m still grumpy and miserable.… But in a good way!”
It was as if, after thinking of himself as a struggling actor for so long, Gandolfini didn’t want to lose touch with who he was. He did stay loyal to old Jersey friends, even as he started hanging out with the likes of Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt. Friends like Tom Richardson, now an executive at Attaboy Films, Gandolfini’s production company, and Mark Ohlstein, a chiropractor, and Vito Bellino, an ad executive for The Ledger. They’d hang out with each other and their families, go to the beach, and watch Rutgers football together.
Gandolfini did TV commercials for Rutgers’ Scarlet Knights football team as The Sopranos was reaching the height of its popularity. In 2002, he got Michael Imperioli, who played his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti, on The Sopranos, to direct one that showed Richardson, Ohlstein, and Bellino coming out onto the field at the fifty-yard line, congratulating themselves on how Gandolfini’s celebrity had gotten them “real close” to the action. They ask what it had cost him to get them there, and Gandolfini says, “Me? Nothing.” A moment later they’re shown holding the Scarlet Knight mascot costume, plus the two halves of the costume for his horse. Ohlstein looks into the camera and says, sarcastically, “Close. Real close.”
Nobody escapes the Jersey curse—I don’t care who they think they know.
Never hitting the top of your arc, always bumping against some invisible ceiling, is what Tony, and The Sopranos, was all about. James Gandolfini symbolized that inbred New Jersey pessimism, and made the rest of the world love him for it. Add a few more pounds and a hint of the anger and you’ve got Chris Christie, who may run for president in a few years, something I doubt anybody his size and temperament could have done before Tony Soprano.
Most of the planet lives with its nose against the glass today, looking, the way New Jersey looks across the river to Manhattan, at someone’s more successful life somewhere on the other side of the screen. For white men of a certain age it’s almost endemic. The paradox of James Gandolfini’s life is that by expressing that feeling with frustrated passion, by making us care for the inarticulate longing of a very conflicted but common man, he was able to pass through the screen, move to Tribeca, become rich and famous—for about thirteen lucky years.
* * *
He didn’t make it look easy. In fact, Gandolfini, who decided he wanted to be an actor as early as high school, made it look very hard—like labor, actually. As if carrying Tony Soprano around inside you was like hefting a hod of bricks.
On the set he’d hit himself, hard, in the back of the head, if he flubbed lines or missed his mark. As time went on the actor found it got more difficult to bring the same level of kinetic authenticity to the role. Sometimes he’d just hunker down in his Tribeca apartment and miss a whole shoot, only to show up the next day with gifts, like a masseuse for the crew, or some fabulous caterer for the lunch table. Once, after he’d landed a huge raise, he showed up and peeled off $33,000 apiece for everybody he saw, telling them, “Thanks for sticking with me.”
Fellow actors did stick with him. They saw something special about his talent almost from the beginning. After he’d gotten his first real break, in the 1993 crime thriller True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino), and developed the reputation as an actor with an absolutely fascinating emotional range, Gandolfini seemed oblivious. He would have an acting coach, Susan Aston, with him on nearly every set, something hotshot movie stars rarely do.
Aston met him in the eighties, when Gandolfini was working construction and as a bouncer in nightclubs in New York City. They became acting partners and friends. They met when they were both studying at Actor’s Playhouse, a center for method acting, and specifically the Meisner technique. They worked together until she delivered a eulogy at his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in June 2013.
Meisner’s technique involves a series of interdependent exercises intended to use the actor’s life experiences to obtain spontaneity and emotional coherence. It’s a stage technique but, like all American method acting, it achieves its greatest effects in film. Sanford Meisner developed his method in the 1940s after leaving Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre in New York, which taught a variant of the Stanislavski system. Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, James Caan, Jeff Bridges, Alec Baldwin, and James Franco have all been trained in the Meisner technique, and it is often described as intense and demanding. Some actors, often those who wash out, describe it as abusive and psychologically invasive.
In 2004, Gandolfini made an appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, a program on Bravo hosted by James Lipton, and gave the longest discussion in public he’d ever offered on acting as a profession.
“I remember one thing [an early acting teacher] did for me that got me to a new level was—I had such anger back then,” Gandolfini said. “When you’re young, a lot of people do, everybody does. You’re pissed. And you’re not sure why.…’Cause you want to express something and you’re not sure what it is. Something happened, I think [the acting teacher] told a partner to do something to me. And he did it, and I destroyed the place. Y’know, just all that crap they have onstage. And then she said, at the end of it—I remember my hands were bleeding a little bit and stuff, and the guy had left—and she said, ‘See? Everybody’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. This is what you have to do. This is what people pay for.… They don’t wanna see the guy next door. These are the things you need to be able to express, and control, work on the controlling part, and that’s what you need to show.’”
The distinguishing mark of James Gandolfini as an actor was his ability to find sympathy for the devil within the characters he played without, somehow, suppressing the deviltry. He learned to let people glimpse the monster of his temper as an actor and it was thrilling, so real did the emotion seem.
There’s a single, twelve-minute-long scene in True Romance in which Gandolfini viciously beats Patricia Arquette to get her to tell him where she’s hidden the cocaine he wants. The scene—it took five days to shoot—is incredibly brutal. He pounds her face, throws her through a glass shower door, and repeatedly, gently, tells her why he is in complete control of the situation. Until, that is, she sets him on fire and kills him with his own shotgun.
That scene is almost a movie in itself, a journey of character discovery with an astonishing denouement. But what stands out is Gandolfini’s thoughtful, almost playful attitude until the very end. The chilling way he clothes his anger in a slight smile, while not really hiding it at all. It’s a virtual audition for the part of Tony Soprano.
The psychological tension necessary to maintain that characterization over several days of technical shooting was extraordinary, for both actors. They had to hit a balletic rhythm, and stay in character after several peaks and valleys of emotional intensity. The pressure on a film set can be intense—visitors, time limits, scheduling conflicts, all contribute to a hectic, distracting environment. Gandolfini’s commitment to technique also demanded a complete immersion in the character to achieve his startling spontaneity.
That may be why, as Aston says, it became almost a standard part of the process for Gandolfini to try to quit every part he ever landed. And that’s why Aston was there—to bring him back to the character. She’d be on the set, then go over the next day’s script with him that night. And they could be long nights—union rules say an actor has to have twelve hours off after every full day, so starting times each succeeding day get pushed farther and farther back until you are filming in the wee hours. He had a bag of Meisnerian tricks—Gandolfini once told the press that if you need to do an angry scene, “don’t sleep” for two or three days, or walk around with something sharp in your shoe—but his real secret was preparation. And a vivid imagination.
Star actors are well paid for what they do, so we needn’t indulge in any false pity here. But many American method actors, especially men, begin to find trolling through such emotional depths increasingly difficult with time. A lot of entertainment doesn’t require it, of course. But that can only add to your frustration with the job. If there is this very difficult thing that you do very well, but it is taxing to do and there isn’t always a demand for it, you can develop a healthy contempt for the whole process. As Brando did, and Mitchum, too.
“It’s a hard head to get into sometimes,” Gandolfini told GQ. “I have a lot of fun at work too, don’t get me wrong. I love the people I work with. But there are some days when you get to work and you’re not angry enough, and you have to kind of get angrier and that’s a little … when I was younger, it was much more accessible.”
Maybe we can illustrate something about the Meisner technique, and method acting in general, with that always coyly self-referential production, The Sopranos. Toward the end of the series there’s an episode where Tony is recovering from being shot in the stomach by Uncle Junior. He’s worried about maintaining the respect of his crew in his weakened condition. He’s tried to compensate by hiring a driver/bodyguard whose obvious muscles—he drives around in a wife-beater and desert camo pants—is part of his job description. So Tony nerves himself up to sucker punch his bodyguard in front of the whole mob family, knocks the guy down, kicks him, and storms into the bathroom.
There we see Tony lean over the sink, breathing heavily, and then suddenly vomit into the toilet. He returns to the sink, stares haggardly at himself in the mirror, and then breaks into a barely perceptible smile. He’s let the mob get a glimpse of the monster again; he’s created the impression he wanted. And then he vomits once more.
For Tony, the scene is about keeping control with a clever stratagem: he’s intimidated the rest of the greedy sharks, and he’s glad he’s done it. But for Gandolfini, the scene is also a tribute to the Meisner technique. Giving us a glimpse of the monster is what actors do, too—as Gandolfini told the audience on Inside the Actors Studio, the best lesson he ever learned in acting school was that they don’t come to see “the guy next door.” Letting us glimpse the monster is what made him such a good actor—that sly little smile in the mirror recognizes that Jim’s done it again, and he’s proud of the effect.
But finding that monster, bringing him up and putting him on the screen in a way that seems entirely convincing, does not come without some psychic cost. That’s the second vomit—the price you pay. Meisner preached using your personal history, your own sadness and pain, the real core of your own feelings, to create a convincing reality on stage or screen. James Gandolfini could bring up the authentic monster. But doing that for years can make you a physical wreck.
“Violent roles?” Gandolfini said, in 2010. “Yeah. That’s all I got for a while. It’s okay. I’m an angry guy. I’m like a sponge. You wring yourself out and then you have none of that left in you for a while. It can be a good thing that way. I’ll do those parts again. It takes a toll though. Definitely takes a toll.”
* * *
Acting is a skill that some of us have and others don’t. And that skill can be improved with practice and discipline. But there’s no question that how you look, your physical type, shapes the roles you’re offered. When Gandolfini was auditioning for Tony Soprano, for example, he was sure the role would go to some “handsome George Clooney type, except Italian.”
The contrast between Gandolfini’s career and that of another Italian-American movie star who also happens to be from a roughly similar neighborhood in New Jersey—John Travolta—is interesting in this way (Travolta’s dad, who lived in Englewood, sold Gandolfini’s dad automobile tires). Travolta’s big break came on TV too, on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter in 1975, when he was barely out of his teens. He’s played handsome leading men all his life.
Gandolfini didn’t get his first sizable role, in True Romance, until he was thirty-two; he didn’t land his first lead role, as Tony, until he was almost thirty-nine (lucky for him the whole country, or at least its social conscience, seemed to be entering middle age at the same time). But it’s not a career path that predominates in entertainment. And, as he told Inside the Actors Studio, you’ve simply “got to work with what you got”—and it can be a blessing. “I wouldn’t have had the roles I’ve gotten if I looked like Peter Pan.”
Of course, most of the people who make their living in front of a camera do look a little like Peter Pan. Looks and hype are twin pillars in the architecture of celebrity culture. Beloved as he was, Gandolfini nonetheless stood out (though not alone, of course) in the lettuce-eating film community. A doctor who’d never treated him told the press after his death that he was “a heart attack waiting to happen.” There were tweets after his death was announced calling him “fatty,” followed by a backlash against the tweeters. The New York Post ran a cover story detailing his last meal in Rome: “Gandolfini guzzled four shots of rum, two piña coladas, and two beers at dinner with his son—while he chowed down on two orders of fried king prawns and a ‘large portion’ of foie gras, a hotel source in Rome said.”
One of Gandolfini’s first jobs in Manhattan was at an Upper East Side wine bar (“you could take home $100, $125 a night in tips there, and it helped if you knew your wine,” a friend who worked with him says). He worked in restaurants, clubs, and bars, like a lot of actors do, for years before he landed his first big part on stage. One of his best friends from his Rutgers days was chef Mario Batali, who started out cooking in a New Brunswick restaurant where Jim worked the bar. Later on, the actor would be a regular at Batali’s New York and L.A. restaurants, which specialize in Italian cuisine. The redheaded, portly Batali is also an expert in classical Italian cooking, and his ancestors go back more than a century in the West Coast Italian-American community.
Gandolfini didn’t just serve time in the food-and-drink industry. While still in his midtwenties he was hired to manage Private Eyes, a big, high-tech, high-priced nightclub on West Twenty-first Street in New York. He was good at his job, managing a “whole crew of bouncers,” buying liquor, running the help staff. And managing the public, too. There’s more than a little Manhattan bouncer in Tony Soprano and many of his film roles.
The caricature of the New Jersey good life—good food, drink, people, family—well, not everybody comes out of that looking like The Situation. New Jersey is often described as a “tribal” state, an archipelago of different ethnic cultures that persist even now. Among Italian-Americans who migrated westward along Bloomfield Avenue, away from Newark into the thinning ether of suburbia, the maintenance of the culture, and resistance to assimilation, is closely tied to family and food. The Sopranos devoted a whole episode to it.
That Gandolfini was part of that culture contributed to the authenticity he brought to the role of Tony. As an actor of surprising range, he could find an authenticity in all sorts of characters. After all, he’s played a New York City mayor (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3), an American general (In the Loop), even the director of the CIA (albeit the first Italian-American one, Leon Panetta, in Zero Dark Thirty). But many of the people who knew him well describe Gandolfini’s life as a search for authenticity, both professionally and personally. That’s why he tried to quit so often, because he feared he could not summon it; that’s why his performances have such an unexpected impact when he brings it. The number of times he called “bullshit” on acting and Hollywood and publicity departments would almost fill a book itself. He was serious about what he did.
So there was no easy line on his life for the press. He had not constructed a pasteboard identity to go with the role of James Gandolfini that he tried to hawk the way so many young actors do.
Oh, he’d thought about it. One weekend when he was first starting to find his footing as an actor on the stage in New York, he went home for dinner with his parents and sisters, and asked them if they’d mind if he changed his name to “James Leather,” so that fans wouldn’t come knocking on the Gandolfini door.
“I said, ‘If I get famous, it could be a pain in the ass.’” They seemed to be mulling it over as he got up to go to the bathroom. When he came back, they were all laughing hysterically at the idea that Jimmy Gandolfini will become famous. “So that’s my family, you know?”
It’s a common contradiction, the contrast between who you are and who you’re playing. Gandolfini never completely lost that conflict, again like so many great method actors before him. It made him an acrobat in pain, always the best show under the tent. It also made him intensely private, reluctant to talk about himself, and so a bit of a mystery to his fans, who perhaps could be forgiven for calling him “Tony” when they met in person. Gandolfini as an actor seemed totally unguarded, but as a man, there were walls.
He made his name playing a series of thinking hitmen: Virgil in True Romance; Ben Pinkwater, a seemingly mild-mannered insurance salesman who turns out to be a psychotically violent Russian mobster, in Terminal Velocity; a gentle leg-breaker and bodyguard for gangsters in Get Shorty; a mob enforcer who turns on his partner, played by Alec Baldwin, in The Juror. And, of course, Tony Soprano. A little mystery probably helped the gregarious party animal get over in those roles. It certainly helped deliver the shock of Tony Soprano’s near reality TV presence for a decade.
Gandolfini became very good at hinting at depths of sadness and vulnerability that were left mostly to the imagination. When he won his third Emmy as a leading dramatic actor for The Sopranos, he gave a short, heartfelt acceptance speech that included a mention of Lynne Jacobson, whom viewers may have assumed was a college acting teacher, or an old friend who kept him in school, or something. It wasn’t until almost a year later, in an interview, that he acknowledged publicly that she had been his first love while they were both at Rutgers, and she’d died in a car accident when he was still a junior.
Jim always said he wanted to play people “like my mom and dad.” He complained about superhero movies, which have largely taken over Hollywood, helping to shift serious drama over to cable (a cultural reversal Gandolfini is often credited with achieving almost single-handedly). Movies were all so fake. Gandolfini wanted to be real.
So did The Sopranos. It was art imitates life imitates art: Bringing the American bromance of gangster movies to modern suburban life, where the church has lost credibility, the neighborhood is scattered, and family is attenuated to the point of transparency. Where did the real begin and the fake start? What is real anyway?
The series became a long tease about those questions. And at first the final episode’s fade to black seemed like an evasive answer. “When I first saw the ending, I said, ‘What the fuck?’” Gandolfini told Vanity Fair the year before he died. “I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that?”
Then he woke up the next morning.
“But after I had a day to sleep, I just sat there and said, ‘That’s perfect.’”