6.
When the first episode of The Sopranos aired on January 10, 1999, nobody could possibly have foretold what the show would become—a monster hit, driving audiences for serious drama away from movies to cable television (of all places), and the first TV series to earn over a billion dollars in syndication, DVD sales, video game profits, etc. Critical raves rolled in.
That kind of thing made James Gandolfini very nervous.
Susan Aston says Jim “tried to quit every role he ever got.” It was indeed almost a tic he had. Even for his work on The Sopranos. He stopped in the middle of his audition with David Chase and begged to be allowed to come back and do it again—he said he had an illness in his family, and he just wasn’t hitting it right. He didn’t even show up for the second audition. Gandolfini apologized and asked if he could come by Chase’s house and audition there. Surprised, Chase agreed, and Gandolfini came over and auditioned in his garage later that night. He finished the whole scene in one go.
“What happens every time [when you’re casting something] is that people come in and read, and they read and they read, and you start to think, This is really badly written, the thing sucks,” is how Chase remembered Gandolfini’s final audition to Vanity Fair’s Peter Biskind. “And then the right person comes in, and it all works. It was pretty obvious that Jim had too much going on for this role to go with anyone else.”
But Gandolfini didn’t see it that way. “I read it. I liked it. I thought it was good,” James said afterward. “But I thought they would have to hire some good-looking guy, not George Clooney, but some Italian George Clooney, and that would be that.”
Gandolfini’s manager and friend Mark Armstrong, who has worked with the agency handling Jim’s career since Angie in 1994, said it got to be like clockwork. “About a week before a production was supposed to start filming, we’d get a letter, copied to the director, in which Jim would give everybody an out, asking them if they were sure they thought he could do the part. And he’d always include the names of three actors he thought were available who could do a better job.”
In an industry as ego-driven as show business, Gandolfini’s behavior was, to put it mildly, unusual. You might think it was just a way to ward off the evil eye, you know, to placate Nemesis for a lucky break you might not deserve. But James really seemed to mean it. Everyone who knew him smiles about his absolute modesty. He almost never watched himself perform in daily rushes (he hated looking at them). He had a hard time seeing in his performances what other people saw; he noticed mostly the flaws. And that didn’t change as he got more famous as an actor.
It’s particularly difficult for us to sympathize with Gandolfini about his talent because it’s so hard to imagine any other actor making a better Tony Soprano. Starting with that iconic first episode—Tony wading into his swimming pool in his bearish white terrycloth bathrobe to commune with the wild ducks—he just seemed perfectly suited to the role, physically and emotionally.
“The thing about actors is, when they’re really great, they have no idea when they do great work,” says Harold Guskin, who helped coach Gandolfini for most of his film roles.
“The Great Guskin,” as John Lahr called him in The New Yorker, has been coaching actors for some twenty-five years, starting with Kevin Kline, who met Guskin in the 1970s when they were both musicians at Indiana University in Bloomington. Guskin’s approach isn’t method, but more personal; the idea is to help actors “stop acting” and deliver immediate emotions as if they were immersed in real life. His 2005 book, How to Stop Acting, includes quotes from clients like Kline, Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, and, of course, James Gandolfini.
“Acting has to come from the gut,” says Guskin, slapping his still-flat middle. “You don’t act with your head. You have to deliver your lines as if they are spoken in real time, in real life. Immediacy is the object. So an actor who is doing really great work shouldhave no idea how well he’s doing. It’s over too quick for him to know.
“And then after acting comes the questioning of everything you did,” he continues. “The second thoughts, the self-doubt. It’s horrible. Being an actor is very difficult. The pressure … can be tremendous.”
Many actors have self-esteem issues long before they go on stage; in fact, that’s why some are there in the first place, to get unqualified approval from an abstract group of people who don’t really know them. Still, even for the best, how they do what they do can be a psychological puzzle. “Some actors are embarrassed by acting,” says Nicole Holofcener, who directed Gandolfini in his last feature film, the realistic romantic comedy Enough Said. “Just opening their mouths and talking is an embarrassment, and it takes a lot of courage to go on and get through a scene.”
Stage actors get an immediate reaction from the crowd, but TV and film acting is mysterious until long after it’s been performed, recorded, and edited. So the place of the audience is taken by the director and the crew.
And the crew, as many theater people say, is an idealized family. “It’s like a family that you know is going to go through a divorce in three months,” Susan Aston says, “except, in the case of The Sopranos, the family lasted ten years.”
On a lot of TV shows, the star is the head of the “family.” In most, the principal actor is much more than just an actor—it’s not exactly being the producer, or the director, or the owner of the network, but it’s not just reading lines, either. While they were shooting the first season, Gandolfini told one of his closest associates that “it didn’t feel right, that he wasn’t really a lead actor, that he saw himself differently than that.” It was, after all, his first lead since Tarantulas Dancing. And yet he went around meeting the other actors and the crew, shaking hands, asking if he could help them in any way, just like a veteran lead.
Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played Tony Soprano’s daughter, Meadow, once told Rolling Stone that Gandolfini would get on the phone with her boyfriend and ask him if he was treating her right. She wasn’t a child star, exactly, but started on The Sopranos as a teenager, and came of age on the set. “He’s actually just like a teddy bear,” Sigler said of Gandolfini. “I think of him as my second father. You can sit down and have the nicest conversation with him, and then he’ll get up and punch walls and beat someone up.”
But The Sopranos family chart was more complicated than any real family’s. David Chase was originally a writer, and in many ways always has been. And writers are not usually at the top of any chart except one made up of other writers. But Chase was a good manager, he’d produced several commercial TV hits, and he changed how writers were viewed in the industry. Through the idiosyncratic success of The Sopranos, Chase became the first of a series of “showrunners” who were responsible for creating a new golden age of serious, adult drama on cable TV at the turn of the last century.
And that meant putting great authority in the hands of former writers. Cable dramas are writer-driven because each episode, while containing a ringing climax for its own story, was simultaneously part of a longer arc of thirteen episodes that were supposed to build dramatic tension and provide a satisfying cumulative climax as a finale. This gave TV drama some of the qualities of nineteenth-century serial fiction, like the novels of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, all of which were written to appear in newspapers or magazines.
Like Les Misérables, The Sopranos could introduce minor characters that act as leitmotifs inside the larger story, but seem fully rounded dramas all their own; The Sopranos could start and drop themes, return to them, and consider them from every possible angle. But to make sense, those many interwoven threads had to be judged for tone from a single viewpoint, and that, in the case of The Sopranos, was David Chase’s.
Chase had never believed TV could be anything more than a commercial medium. Growing up in New Jersey, he idolized rock stars like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as the “real artists,” who made art out of their everyday experiences without reference to any academy or theory of practice. Behind the camera, he lionized New Wave auteurs and the rebellious European filmmakers of the 1960s whose work defied all convention. For Chase, working in TV was a compromise, because every episode had to have a neat resolution that encouraged viewers to “go out and buy stuff.” It was something he did for money, almost a mark of shame.
Cable TV offered an escape from such limitations. HBO didn’t sell ads against The Sopranos. They sold subscriptions, which were more like movie tickets. Actors could say “fuck” on the air—in fact, they said it so often, and to such hilarious effect, that the writer in Chase worried they were using it too much, like a crutch. Themes that are almost never explored on network television, like the economics of hospital care, or the ambiguities of senile dementia, were fit topics for The Sopranos. Chase could use the show to examine aspects of family life that were becoming rare in movies, too.
As creator and showrunner, Chase was the ultimate dad of The Sopranos, but at the same time, Gandolfini became his avatar. The extraordinarily talented actor made the scripts come alive; he made Chase’s long-running angst about his New Jersey mom—so different from James’s deep affection for his own—into art millions could enjoy, even identify with. (Joe Pantoliano, who played Ralph Cifaretto for two seasons, once observed to Peter Biskind that every Italian family he knew was run by these very strong mothers, and that was what struck him about The Godfather. In that movie, “everybody is always worried about him,” and that seemed totally weird after growing up under his mother’s thumb—and then he heard that Mario Puzo had based the character of the Godfather not on his dad, but on his mom, and it all fell into place.)
But as cable dramas spooled out into multiyear events, running the show became a massive job. There were hundreds of employees, costume designers, prop men, photographers, writers for spin-off productions (the video games, for example), and assistants for every one of them, all trying to clear their concerns through the office of the showrunner. He’d conceived the whole show, he’d chosen the actors and the writers, he even said yes or no to how fat an actor was supposed to be (he made Vincent Pastore wear a fat suit until the second season). And yet, he was so busy and preoccupied, he sometimes seemed unreachable.
Is there any other kind of organization—besides an actual family, that is—with such ambiguous lines of authority? Or any other that allows, maybe encourages, such waves of insecurity?
“By the end, I had a lot of anger over things and I think it was just from being tired, and what in God’s name would I have to be angry about?” Gandolfini wondered years later to Vanity Fair. “The man gave me such a gift in terms of life experience, in terms of acting experience, in terms of money, too. At the beginning, David came to the set a lot, but once it got bigger and it became this thing, you know, he was a little more standoffish. He was harder to talk to. I understand that. The pressure that he had to continue to create, to continue to do great work, was hard. Everybody starts to want something, everybody starts to call, and this one needs this, and can we talk about that? And then there’s money, and so you have to pull back and try to protect yourself in a way. I had to learn it and I wasn’t very good at it. But then it starts to take its toll. The first couple of years, it was easier. It wasn’t such a huge deal. I’ve said this to him, but maybe not so clearly. I got it. He had to be a little bit of the ‘Great and Powerful Oz.’ There was no choice.”
And as the ultimate cast father figure became increasingly remote, his time budgeted among various constituencies like a Chinese emperor’s time was divvied up among court ceremonies, the family members grew anxious. At the same time, the more Gandolfini made the cast and crew his family, replacing Chase as in loco parentis, the more he worried about his ability to deliver for them.
You can easily see echoes of Tony Soprano’s problems everywhere, almost like the show was teasing everybody, the actors, the writers, the producers, the network suits, everybody, including the viewers, as to what was real and what was art.
Getting whacked became the ultimate symbol of losing the family. Because, for the actors, it was indeed the same thing as getting fired from the family. “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero’s death at the conclusion of the second season (Tony discovered he’d become an FBI informant) became the template: The cast took actor Vincent Pastore out for a send-off dinner after his fictional death—a sort of Irish wake for a dead Italian (who wasn’t really dead). Many of The Sopranos’ crew said the day Big Pussy was whacked was the first time they had ever felt serious tension on the set.
And out of that tension, out of that desire to save all the wild ducks who filled the staff and crew of The Sopranos, grew a weighty paranoia. Rolling Stone told the story this way in 2001:
[Gandolfini] realized what was going on: David Chase was planning to have Tony Soprano whacked. “I had an unusually belligerent day,” Gandolfini says, “and I went home and I was sitting there and I was struck with the realization.… I said, ‘David’s going to kill me.’”
The next morning, he called Chase at home. “He said that during the night he was not able to sleep,” says Chase, “and he said to me, ‘I realized: Oh, shit, I know what he’s doing—he’s going to kill me off.’” Listening to Gandolfini, Chase realized “something like how much I value this show, how great it’s all been. And that it would be entirely possible to do that—would actually make for an interesting surprise. I just felt very warm toward him. And I thought to myself, ‘Man, actors, we forget what it’s like to be an actor.’ How little they have to hang on to, in a way. What they do is so ephemeral. Here he is, a huge star, the most popular guy, and that he would think that. You know what else I thought? ‘That guy’s an artist.’ Because even if it went through most TV stars’ minds, they’d never make that call. Even if it flitted through their mind, they would say, ‘Well, I’m indispensable, there’s no show without me.’ And that’s why he’s an artist. Theoretically I think we should believe that it could happen. I think if you start to think that Tony is not in jeopardy, that’s not a good thing.”
Chase told him he was “a fucking lunatic.”
This would not be the last time Chase had to tell Gandolfini something like that. In fact, as the show went on, and the accolades for both men kept rolling in, Gandolfini’s confidence, if anything, got worse. He’d beg for time off, miss takes, sometimes disappear for a day, two, even three, when he had some difficult scene that required an emotional push.
It happened because it was good. Because everyone working on The Sopranos knew they had lucked into that sweet place where they had freedom, money, control, and an audience for everything they did. For an artist, it doesn’t get better than that.
It doesn’t get worse, either.
* * *
In a show about family, if it’s going to be true to life, everything will be about compromise.
The character of Tony Soprano was hemmed in by his families: nuclear, extended, and criminal, and by the much larger dysfunctional family of his country, which was attacked on September 11, 2001, just as The Sopranos was hitting its stride. The show at first seemed to be about American economic dysfunction: the only families that make it in middle-class America anymore have to be doing something illegal, or anyway something that should be illegal. But as America went on a ten-year-long hunt to whack enemies and disloyal allies around the world, the footprint of The Sopranos inevitably grew.
That was in the accordionlike nature of what David Chase had created. A satire of American family life would naturally reflect all the changes shaping the larger culture, just as Carroll O’Connor had reflected the working class’s conversion to Ronald Reagan on All in the Family or Homer Simpson reflects the obesity epidemic (and so much else) on The Simpsons. The Sopranos would adapt itself to reality like a vine does to the stake it curls around—this kind of average family depiction is what TV has always done best. But the process of creating a cable series had another layer of complexity. The show would adapt itself to the qualities brought to it by its lead actor, too.
In the very beginning, when Chase was talking with Fox TV about developing the show, Broadway star Anthony LaPaglia (who won a Tony for his role in A View from the Bridge in 1998) was the leading candidate to play the mob boss on Prozac. But LaPaglia couldn’t commit, and in the end Fox passed, as all the broadcast networks did. When finally HBO gave the greenlight in 1998, Chase brought three actors to the company as possible Tony Sopranos: Steven Van Zandt, former guitar player for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, character actor Michael Rispoli, who’d played Aida Turturro’s husband in Angie, and James Gandolfini.
Chase had been intrigued by Little Stevie Van Zandt after watching his speech for the induction of The Rascals into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on VH1, but HBO was worried about him because he’d never acted before. Van Zandt wound up, of course, as Tony’s consigliere, nightclub impresario Silvio Dante. Rispoli was thought to be much funnier than Gandolfini, more charming. But that wasn’t ultimately what Chase was looking for—Rispoli took the part of the Jersey don dying of cancer in the early episodes, whose death clears the way for Tony’s rise.
“The show I envisioned is the show that’s got Jimmy in it,” Chase told Alan Sepinwall for his book, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever. “It’s a much darker show with Jimmy in it.
“At one time, I had said that this thing could be like a live-action Simpsons,” Chase continued. “Once I saw him do it, I thought, ‘No, that’s not right. It can be absurdist, it can have a lot of stupid shit in it, but it should not be a live-action Simpsons.”
It was the astonishing immediacy of Gandolfini’s temper that made him stand out (one of producer Brad Grey’s assistants had sent Chase that twelve-minute clip from True Romance before the auditions). But it was the way he tried to stifle his anger, to keep it from breaking out, that made the part perfect for him. Gandolfini was unmatched in his ability to show bridling impatience with his loved ones turn almost instantaneously into heartfelt sympathy. He was a poet of the emotional burdens of long-term loyalty. He wanted to be a perfect dad. In just the worst way.
And that was another stake for the vine to curl around, because the success of The Sopranos echoed through Gandolfini’s personal life, and in several different ways.
For one thing, it meant a serious boost in his income. Remember, just two years before he tried out for the part of Tony, when Sidney Lumet called Jim to offer the role of a corrupt cop in Night Falls in Manhattan, Gandolfini was working a part-time job planting trees in the sidewalk when he took the call on his cell. A TV series meant steady work. More work, as it turned out, than anyone expected. He stood to make more money in the first year than he had on all his movies combined.
Gandolfini was thirty-eight years old when he auditioned for Tony Soprano, getting into middle age by most definitions. Yet he had not had the lead in a film or TV program until Tony Soprano came along. And even then, The Sopranos was not a network show. Back in 1999, the big earners on TV were network comedians, like Ray Romano, Kelsey Grammer, and Tim Allen who was pulling down $1.6 million per episode of Home Improvement as early as 1996. The quartet on Friends were getting $750,000 an episode by 2000, and as much as $1 million per by 2002.
Cable pay was more modest, though it certainly beat planting trees. For the first season of The Sopranos, Gandolfini was paid $55,000 an episode, a little more than $650,000 for the season. In 1999 he appeared in just one movie, 8MM, a thriller about snuff films starring Nicholas Cage, which got disappointing reviews. He’d signed a standard five-year contract with HBO, but as was pretty common in the business, the company bumped his salary for the second season when they saw the show was a hit (it’s not entirely clear, but guesstimates of $200,000 per episode have been made). Gandolfini released no movies in 2000, when he concentrated almost exclusively on Tony Soprano.
David Chase was in the same boat. Although he was given $100,000 for the pilot script, his starting salary as showrunner in 1999 was around $50,000 to $60,000 per episode.
Gandolfini had to welcome the money. In 1999, James was deciding to start a family in real life, too, for the first time, with Marcy Wudarski.
Marcy was born Marcella Ann Wudarski in 1967. She came from a military family, and graduated in 1981 from Bayonet Point Junior High School in Hudson, Florida. “He was nobody when we met,” Marcy told the New York Post much later. “I was between jobs, working for a movie company, and a friend suggested I be a part-time helper, do some piddling things for ‘this actor you never heard of who’s made a couple of nothing movies.’”
They’d been a couple since 1997. When The Sopranos started, Marcy had already moved into the West Village apartment James had bought in 1996. He added an adjoining apartment as The Sopranos started, and started furnishing it with stuff they’d picked up in big-box stores. They had a son, Michael, later in 1999. James’s two families would grow together, on camera and off.
* * *
Shooting an episode for the first season of The Sopranos was something like shooting that twelve-minute fight scene in True Romance over five days. Except The Sopranos was shooting a fifty-minute episode over eight days, with dozens of interacting characters on several different sets and outdoor locations.
The same SAG rules applied—actors had to have twelve hours between a wrap and the next day’s start, so each hour you run over one day adds an hour to when you finish the next. By the end of the week, days no longer begin or end—they’re figments of the Gregorian calendar.
A cable “season” is shorter than a network season—The Sopranos did thirteen hour-long episodes most seasons, compared to a network’s twenty-two to twenty-four episodes a year. A network sitcom clocks in at twenty-two minutes an episode, an hour-long drama usually at forty-four minutes an episode. Cable dramas are longer and more variable, lasting anywhere from forty-five to fifty-five minutes. (That means a comic with a hit network show actually puts in about as much screen time in twenty-four episodes as The Sopranos did in twelve.) During its first season, Sopranos episodes were shot in eight days, a breakneck pace compared to those in the final season, which took as much as twenty-eight days to shoot.
James had kept the practice of developing character notes for each of his roles, writing them down in a notebook, just as he had done with Susan Aston for Tarantulas Dancing. The notebooks were filled with social background, family details, bits of memory, what acting coach Harold Guskin calls “incredibly complex, just dozens of alternative” histories for each character he was to portray. Gandolfini would copy out bits of dialogue and then write notes about what the character was thinking when delivering those lines, what he knew or did not know that would influence how he said them.
Memorization became a big problem, just like it was so many years ago at Park Ridge High. Gandolfini was in almost every scene. During shooting weeks he had to memorize more dialogue in less time than he ever had before. When they were working on the fifth episode, “College,” cowritten by Chase and James Manos, Jr., in which Tony takes his daughter Meadow to tour potential colleges, Gandolfini hit a wall. Or, better put, he hit a phone booth, as he told Peter Biskind in 2007:
I had never done anything like that amount of memorization in my life. I’m talking five, six, seven pages a night. David might have regretted giving me his home phone number, because I’d wake him up at three thirty in the morning and say, “What the fuck, man?! You’re fuckin’ killing me! I can’t do this. I’m gonna go crazy!” Like I had to do almost a one-page monologue in a phone booth. And being the calm person that I am—especially then—I couldn’t get it. I’d forget my lines. I took the phone, and I smashed it a couple times. After that, I broke the windows in the phone booth. Crack! Smash! Bang! And all I could hear was David laughing hysterically. And then I started laughing. And I said, “You know, I can’t memorize all this shit.” But you learn, you learn how to do it.
The rest of the cast knew it was Gandolfini’s performance that made the show work, and most of them understood the intense pressure he had to be under. “He was a great actor, man, a great actor,” Tony Sirico told me. “I watched him like a hawk. The way he’d give a line and then take a breath, look at you, like he was thinking it over.… He worked so hard, that Jimmy. I did the ‘Pine Barrens’ [the 2001 episode in which Christopher Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts take a Russian mobster out into a frozen forest and shoot him, chase him, and then get lost in the snow]. I was in thirty scenes—thirty scenes! I lost like ten pounds. And Jimmy did that every week.”
“Some of that turmoil that’s inside of Jim, that pain and sadness, is what he uses to bring that guy to the screen,” Chase once said about the phone booth incident. “He’d complain, ‘These things I have to do [as Tony], I behave in such a terrible way.’ I’d say to him, ‘It says in the script, “He slammed the refrigerator door.” It didn’t say, “He destroys the entire refrigerator!” You did that. This is what you decide to bring to it.’”
Chase laughed again. “The reason I was amused [when he destroyed the phone booth] is because I have these same tendencies as he does, which is I’m very infantile about temper tantrums with inanimate objects. Telephones and voicemail menus, that sort of stuff drives me crazy.”
So much of acting is about discipline, concentration, and preparation, combined with endless sitting around and waiting, that it seemed almost designed to challenge Gandolfini’s temper. And that might be why the guy who never backed away from a physical challenge was so drawn to it in the first place. “I yell when I can’t put shit together,” Gandolfini told GQ many years later. “When you’ve got to screw little fucking screws into little things, like putting a table together. I start screaming, ‘This fucking crap …This shit … Fucking Japanese shit…’ Like that.
“I used to have to put Ikea furniture together when we were first married and had the baby. All that Ikea shit. I used to swear and yell. So occasionally I’ll have that Italian ‘fucking’ fit. Which is funny. I mean, I’ve had some good laughs at my father’s fits.
“But then, some ain’t so funny.”
If shooting a cable drama in eight days seemed to drive middle-aged men on high-protein diets to apoplexy, the structure was often like putting together an Ikea end table. Nothing is shot in sequence, of course. The actor doesn’t see the finished product, only all the pieces scattered around him. If you’re playing a supporting role in a film, with a discrete few pages of dialogue and one, maybe two tricky action shots, it can be easy to keep track of your character development from scene to scene. But for a weekly drama, especially one with as many moving parts as The Sopranos, just knowing who you were from shot to shot was an achievement.
James had called Susan Aston when he got the part. He knew he’d be in New York City much more consistently for a while, so that was good. As he had for years, he’d discuss character issues with her, go over scenes, and trade suggestions and acting tips. They talked about scenes in the pilot, about Tony as a character, and about the scripts, which they both thought were just the “best writing in the world.”
One thing led to another, and Aston started to keep notes for every scene, story, and episode on her computer. Above and below each passage of dialogue she’d type in notes for Gandolfini about what the character knew, felt, had said or would say about this point in the story. There’d be questions about how he felt about the characters he shared the scene with, too—like, “Does Tony think Christopher is too undisciplined for this honor?”
At first, it was informal. “I worked with him on the pilot, but we didn’t know that would go anywhere,” Aston recalls. Aston was already pretty busy, teaching acting at Pace University, every Monday through Thursday from 2:00 to 5:00 P.M. They were sort of assuming that as the role went on, James would be able to wing it more. And then, early in the first season, James destroyed the telephone booth when he couldn’t remember his lines. And the production decided to hire Aston.
“I didn’t get paid until the third episode,” she says. “They listed me as ‘dialogue coach,’ because I couldn’t be an acting coach, you couldn’t say that. It’s not that he needed someone to teach him how to play Tony, but he did need someone to collaborate with on the overwhelming amount of actor’s homework he had every night.”
Aston became the keeper of Tony Soprano’s psychology. James told Aston she was “his Dr. Melfi” when it came to putting the character on the screen.
“The actor always knows more than the character,” Aston explains. “You know, if you have a big fight with your wife and you have to leave the house before you can make peace with her, all day long that need is working on your unconscious, even if you’re not thinking about it or even aware of it. But an actor has to look at the whole story all the time. An actor has to put that mechanism in place, so that when he expresses the character you can see it.”
And The Sopranos really was about one character, with all the supporting characters funneled through his head: Tony.
“On the set of The Sopranos, they called us an old married couple,” Aston says, “because after a day’s shoot, James was never free to just go off with the other actors. Todd Kessler [a friend of James’s and a writer and cocreator of the FX series Damages] came to me at the wake and said, ‘I can’t tell you the number of times when I was out with James and I heard him say, “Ahhh, I can’t, I gotta go work with Susan Aston.’” Because we were there night after night when a day’s work was done for everyone else, going over eight or ten pages of dialogue for the next day.… We had to, in order to be prepared. Never mind memorizing all that.”
Gandolfini had his own system for memorizing his lines—writing his cues on one side of a 3 × 5 note card and his lines on the other. At the heart of the Meisner method of acting, you’ll remember, is listening—responsiveness to other actors. That had always been the dynamic of their acting together, that duet of accents. Bucky leaning over M’Darlin’ to get inches from her face and try to overwhelm her, M’Darlin’ standing up to him but evasively, maddeningly, never saying exactly what she meant. Maybe a little like Nancy Marchand as Livia Soprano. But more like the North invades the South and gets lost somewhere in the bayous. Think, again, of A Streetcar Named Desire.
And out of that came the sense of a man caged, haltered, powerful but trying to balance a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties. A man who hurts others out of his own pain, who wants to stay loyal to his own family while setting the worst example for them because of who he can’t help being. A family guy whose job demands he cheat and brutalize a succession of other families in his life no matter what he wants to do. Stanley rapes Stella’s sister Blanche every night, twice on matinee days.
Preparation was Gandolfini’s secret sauce, the craftsmanship he brought to every project that justified his contribution. Gandolfini once told Brad Pitt—“because I couldn’t think of anything else to say”—that he felt he was so lucky just to be there—the son of immigrants, sharing the camera with people like Pitt, or Gene Hackman. Or Lorraine Bracco, for god’s sake, who’d once had a child (and a famously unhappy break-up) with Harvey Keitel, the star of Mean Streets, one of James’s favorite movies.
Pitt told him he wasn’t lucky, he’d “worked his ass off” to get there, just as he himself had. The quality of the work was proof.
The Sopranos crew had only an inkling that first season of the alchemy that they were committing. Or that in the years to come James Gandolfini would become more than an avatar for David Chase. Chase called Gandolfini a “Mozart,” with no idea of how brilliant his acting was—like Mozart, Jim was still basically a little boy.
One of the classic stories about Jim on the set of The Sopranos became the “hula dance” he’d do to distract Bracco during her close-ups. When she was supposed to be listening to Tony Soprano as Dr. Melfi with a wise or at least noncommittal seriousness on her face, Jim Gandolfini would occasionally be standing next to the camera, mooning her.
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“We had no idea, we were just so busy doing our work,” Tony Sirico says. “Then we went over to Italy for the beginning of the second season, to Naples. That’s where my people are from. I’m what they call a Napoli don. The Isle of Capri is just a few miles up the coast from there, you know, [he starts to sing,] ‘T’was on the Isle of Capri that I found her.…’ And who do I get to go to Capri with? Big Pussy. Vincent Pastore.
“Anyway, so we get to the island, and we get off the boat and get on the what do you call it, the train up the mountain,” he continues. “And so Vincent and I are there in the car, we’re just sitting there, and there’s like fifteen tourists from Ireland in the car, and we hear them start saying, ‘Hey, it’s Paulie, that’s Pussy!’ Like, they know us. Tourists from fucking Ireland know the show! That’s when it hit me. This thing was a really big deal.”
Some TV shows take a little time to find an audience. But not The Sopranos. Overnight, James Gandolfini became one of the most recognizable American actors in the world. He certainly couldn’t hide: he was six feet tall and, at the beginning of the show, some 265 pounds. Is anyone ever prepared for the way celebrity can upend their sense of self? Some people, like those whose parents work in the entertainment business, have at least seen it in their regular lives. People like Robert Downey, Jr., say, or Jeremy Piven.
Gandolfini wasn’t like them. He’d already lived more than half—more like three-fourths—of his life before celebrity happened to him. One of the strangest things to Jim was the way his character could do the most horrible things (like garrote a Mafia snitch he sees while taking Meadow on that tour of colleges, an act so gruesome HBO executives pleaded with Chase to cut it), and yet the public seemed to love him for it. He was playing a villain, in his words a “New Jersey lunatic.” It made no rational sense, like American celebrity itself.
But his incredible popularity was unmistakable. Gandolfini’s manager Mark Armstrong tells the story of how, by the middle of the first season, HBO was asking Gandolfini to help out their other big production, Friday night boxing, by coming to the HBO skybox and making an appearance before the fight. Armstrong and his partner, Nancy Sanders, flew out from Los Angeles in March 1999 on business, and Gandolfini asked them to come with him to a Holyfield-Lewis match.
Armstrong says they met in the skybox with a bunch of people from HBO. And then four security guards showed up and asked Jim to come with them.
“I thought, that’s a little unusual,” Armstrong says. “People would stop Jim when he was visiting L.A. with me, but it was usually like one or two people, and they’d say things like, ‘Mr. Gandolfini, I really respect your work, sir.’ But here in New York, somebody had assigned him four security guards—this is going to be different.
“So these guards walk us out into Madison Square Garden. And the whole place erupts, ‘To-nee! To-nee! To-nee!!’ And he put his arms around both our shoulders, drew us close, and said, ‘See what you’ve done to my life?’”
It was incredible, it was like a joke. (Other people reported that when he took them out into those cheers at the Garden, he’d lean over and say, “Be nice to me, or I’ll have them kill you.”) It seemed so far outside his notion of who he was.
The day after that Madison Square Garden crowd scene, Gandolfini did a reading with Meryl Streep for a movie they were considering (it didn’t work out). After the reading Mark and Nancy walked Streep and Jim back to her hotel in midtown, and every block, people would recognize him, shout out “Hey, Tony!” or stop them to tell him The Sopranos had shot some scene in front of a best friend’s house in Jersey or something. Meryl Streep, of course, has been nominated seventeen times and won three Oscars. She is almost universally admired as one of the leading American actors of her generation, a famed technician of character whose ability to inhabit any role has been her hallmark ever since she starred at the Yale Drama Department. And she looked at Jim and said, “How do you do it?”
“What are you talking about?” Jim asked in reply. “You’re Meryl Streep. Like, everybody knows you.”
Streep looked up at Gandolfini and said, “Have you noticed, they’re not yelling at me?”