There’s a marvelous moment in the second episode of The Sopranos, in which an actor portraying Martin Scorsese is whisked into a nightclub while Christopher Moltisanti, a member of Tony Soprano’s crew, recognizes the famous director and yells out, “Marty! Kundun. I liked it,” referring to the director’s 1997 film about the early life of the Dalai Lama. As a number of the series’s writers told Vanity Fair, a thread of Buddhism runs through several of these 86 tales of murder, betrayal, lust, ambition, and psychotherapy. In Tony’s symbol-laden, near-death dream as he fights for life after being shot in the gut by Uncle Junior, a Buddhist monk gives Tony a Zen-like slap, knocking him to the ground, challenging him to give up his arrogance. But Buddhism isn’t the only surprising element in this saga of a New Jersey crime family; the series creator, David Chase, and his writers were influenced as much by The Honeymooners and The Three Stooges as by Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese. The over-the-top violence, for instance, was inspired by the Stooges and also by William Wellman’s The Public Enemy, James Cagney’s 1931 tour-de-force gangster movie, and Cagney himself was a major influence on Chase and many of the writers and actors, such as Tony Sirico, who played Paulie Walnuts with such accuracy that people thought he was a made guy in real life. Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is even shown watching the scene of a murdered Cagney, trussed up like a mummy, falling facedown through his mother’s front door. (The depiction of violence on-screen has evolved since 1931, when, incredibly, real bullets were used in The Public Enemy.)
Following its debut, on January 10, 1999, The Sopranos became America’s magnificent obsession. The reviews were so ecstatic that they became the subject of a Saturday Night Live spoof (“The Sopranos is so good, if I had to choose between watching The Sopranos and breathing, I’d pause … think about it … then watch another episode”). The cast and crew were showered with praise. Journeyman New York actors such as Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, and Tony Sirico were suddenly rock stars. Their public appearances at hotels and casinos drew thousands of fans. The show hit every cultural marker: a parody in Mad magazine; the covers of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, TV Guide, even The New Yorker; appearances on The Simpsons; not to mention the inevitable academic treatise (“Coming Heavy: Intertextuality and Genre in The Sopranos”). It inspired a pinball machine and a video game (The Sopranos: Road to Respect).
It’s a delicious irony that David Chase—a man devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick, Scorsese, and Roman Polanski—who had always wanted to direct and write for the movies, scored such a big hit on television. (Chase has finally written and directed his first feature film, Not Fade Away, about a rock band in 1960s New Jersey, starring James Gandolfini and John Magaro, to be released later this year.)
During the six seasons it was on the air, The Sopranos knocked over Emmys like so many bowling pins (112 nominations and 21 wins), and—as many testify here—changed the game. It was nominated for outstanding drama series throughout its entire run, and in 2004 it won, a first for cable television. It raised the bar not just for cable and network TV but for the movies as well. Allen Coulter, one of the show’s directors, was given his first feature film, *Hollywoodland—*based on Hollywood Kryptonite, a book I co-authored with Nancy Schoenberger—as a result of his work on The Sopranos. Other Sopranos alumni graduated to award-winning cable shows: executive producer Matthew Weiner created Mad Men, executive producer Terence Winter brought Boardwalk Empire into being (starring Steve Buscemi, who played Tony’s hapless, jailbird cousin Tony Blundetto on The Sopranos), Tim Van Patten directed episodes of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, the writing team of Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess created Blue Bloods, and writer Todd A. Kessler was one of the creators of Damages.
In the five long years since the screen went black and The Sopranos went off the air, on June 10, 2007, there has grown up a kind of omertà around the show: few have been willing to talk about the experience, wanting to move on with their careers and their lives. But through the endless good graces of David Chase, who dreamed up The Sopranos from an idea he had about “a mobster in therapy,” we were able to speak with many of the show’s actors, producers, directors, and writers. What follows, then, is what it felt like to be part of this extraordinary cultural phenomenon. Perhaps Brad Grey, one of the show’s producers, said it best: “I’ll never have that much fun in television again.”
In Which David Chase Is Plucked out of Development Hell
DAVID CHASE (series creator): My father had a hardware store, and he and his business partner were both from Newark. My father’s business partner had a kid my age named Robert Caselli. And Robert Caselli’s cousin—their family name was Soprano. And just recently I found a speech I had given to my class as a kid, and a picture of a robber I had drawn. The last thing said, “If you betray them, they will find you no matter where you are. And you’ll all be dead. They’ll get you, no matter what.” So I think I was always interested in the Mob.
BRAD GREY (executive producer, co-founder of Brillstein-Grey): I had just started this television production company with Bernie Brillstein, and we were putting writers under contract. David had been in television for many, many years [he wrote for The Rockford Files and Kolchak: The Night Stalker in the 70s] but had never really created his own show that was a hit.
DAVID CHASE: When I got over there, they asked, “Would you be interested in doing The Godfather for TV?” I said, “No, it’s already been done.” But then I started thinking about this idea that I’d had for a feature film, about a mobster in therapy. I told them about it, they sparked to it, and Fox bought it. When I wrote the pilot script for Fox, I had a feeling that this whole thing wasn’t going to happen. I knew what network television is like, and this didn’t have that feeling. Sure enough, they passed.
BRAD GREY: After every network passed, the only place I had left to go to was HBO. I knew them very well because we had done a lot of television shows and specials. So I went to Chris Albrecht [head of original programming] and told him about the show.
RICHARD PLEPLER (co-president of HBO): They came in here and said, “Here’s the idea: 40-year-old guy, crossroads of his life, turmoil in his marriage, turmoil in his professional career, beginning to raise teenage kids in modern society—all the pressures of every man in his generation. The only difference is he’s the Mob boss of northern New Jersey. Oh, by the way, he’s seeing a shrink.”
DAVID CHASE: So I was plucked out of development hell at the last minute. If The Sopranos had landed on network TV, it would have been different. I would have been upset with what they wanted me to do. Probably on network, Tony would have had to have been fucking Melfi, right?
In Which a Group of Unknowns Become the Sopranos
JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): I dabbled a little bit in acting in high school, and then I forgot about it completely. And then at about 25 I went to a class. I don’t think anybody in my family thought it was an intelligent choice. I don’t think anybody thought I’d succeed, which is understandable. I think they were just happy that I was doing something.
DAVID CHASE: In the movie version of The Sopranos, I thought about Robert De Niro. For TV, it was audition after audition—a lot of people went up for that role. As a matter of fact, they don’t like you to bring in one person—they want to have some input. So three people were brought to HBO for the role of Tony, and Jim was one of them. And when Jim Gandolfini walked in, that was it.
JAMES GANDOLFINI: I read it. I liked it. I thought it was good. But I thought that they would hire some good-looking guy, not George Clooney but some Italian George Clooney, and that would be that. But they called me and they said can I meet David for breakfast at nine A.M. At the time I was younger and I stayed out late a lot, and I was like, Oh, for fuck’s sake. This guy wants to eat breakfast? This guy’s going to be a pain in the ass. So we met and we spent most of the time laughing about our mothers and our families.
MICHAEL IMPERIOLI (Christopher Moltisanti): Anything I could remotely be right for, I would get an audition for. They brought me in, and I met with David. I thought he hated my audition, because David’s a poker-faced guy. He kept giving me notes and giving me direction, and I walked out of there, and I was like, I blew that one.
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): I had friends telling me there was a script floating around called The Sopranos, and I thought it was about singers. Carmela was very easy to be. I immediately knew how she felt about things, the way she wanted to look. But an Italian-American Mob wife? I’m not the first person I would think of. I would have cast me as Dr. Melfi, but, luckily, I was not in charge.
LORRAINE BRACCO (Dr. Jennifer Melfi): After doing GoodFellas, I was offered every Mafia gal, girl, wife, mistress, daughter available. And I said to them, “No, I don’t want to do that. I did it. Can’t do it better.” I called up my agent the day before I’m going in to meet David, and I go, “I don’t want Carmela—I want Dr. Melfi.”
DAVID CHASE: I was picturing Anne Bancroft as Livia, Tony’s mother. We must have read 200 women or more. Then somebody suggested Nancy Marchand. She came up the stairs; she was very out of breath. She sat down and did it, and she was channeling—that character is based on my mother, her mannerisms—she was channeling her. She just got it. The other people were playing this Italian mama who’s crazy. She was playing some person who’s only hearing what’s going on in her head—that was the key.
DREA DE MATTEO (Adriana La Cerva): I auditioned for Michael Imperioli’s girlfriend in the pilot for The Sopranos, but David didn’t think I was Italian enough. He was like, “You don’t look Italian. You look like a hostess of a restaurant.” And he asked me if I would read that part. So in the pilot I’m a different character. The series got picked up and they called me in to audition again for Michael’s girlfriend. At this point I knew what I was dealing with. So I wore my nameplate in diamonds. I teased my hair up a little bit. One of the words in the line was “Ow,” and the reason that I got the part was because the way I said “Owwuhwhwwwuhwwwuh!” I turned it into, like, five syllables. Later on I hated saying “Christopher” with my accent. I would beg David to let me say “Chrissy” because I felt like my accent sounded really, really fake. Now when I walk down the street, people say, “Just give me one Chris-ta-fuh.”
STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): It was an interesting moment in my life because I had pretty much run out of options. I’d left E Street Band and had gotten obsessed with politics. Did five solo albums with political themes and ended up killing any hope of a musical career by being so extreme politically. All five of my albums were extraordinarily different, which is a sure way to stop a career from happening.
DAVID CHASE (series creator): I had always been a Bruce Springsteen and E Street fan. I used to listen to music a lot on headphones and look at the LP, and Steven Van Zandt’s face always grabbed me. He had this similarity to Al Pacino in The Godfather. Then we were casting the pilot, and my wife, Denise, and I were watching TV. Steven came on VH1, when they were inducting the Rascals into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Steven gave the speech. He was very, very funny and magnetic. I said to my wife, “That guy has got to be in the show!”
STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): David wanted me for Tony, and we have the formality of going out and auditioning for HBO. It was a very funny moment. In the waiting room—I swear to God this is true—I’m going out to audition, and I see Jimmy Gandolfini sitting there. Now, I don’t know if he was there because HBO had decided they were not going to cast me because I’d never acted before—which is what they ended up telling David—or whether Jimmy was there for another part. I never asked him.
TONY SIRICO (Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri): I read for Uncle Junior. It was me, Dominic Chianese, and Frank Vincent who went up for the role that day. About an hour after I got home, I got a call from David Chase. He said, “You want the good news or the bad news?” I said, “Give me the bad news.” He said, “You didn’t get Uncle Junior. But I have something in mind. Would you be willing to do a recurring role on the show? I have a character called Paulie Walnuts … ”
DOMINIC CHIANESE (Corrado “Uncle Junior” Soprano): About a week after my audition, one of the executive producers came in, kept me in a room for an hour and a half with different kinds of glasses … That helped me tremendously—subconsciously at first and then consciously. After the first couple of seasons I couldn’t act without them. They were part of my makeup. Those glasses were my mask. We were doing Greek tragedy there. Behind the mask a lot of things come out that you wouldn’t do.
STEVEN SCHIRRIPA (Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri): I had been working as entertainment director at the Riviera in Las Vegas. When I got the script, I remember reading it going, Wait a minute. I mean, Tony’s calling me “a calzone with legs,” and “Consider salads, you fat fuck.” And I’m not that much bigger than him. So at first I thought, Maybe they cast the wrong guy? And then they had me come in a day or two early and they fitted me for a fat suit. And for the first two seasons I was in a fat suit. And then I guess, in Season Four, David thought I was fat enough on my own, so he let me get rid of it.
ANNABELLA SCIORRA (Gloria Trillo): David wanted me to play Janice … but I turned it down because he wanted me to wear age makeup and dye my hair. She was supposed to be much older than Tony, and I wasn’t ready to do that, which is kind of dumb.
AIDA TURTURRO (Janice Soprano): I go in [to audition], and it’s stressful because … everyone’s there. Like everybody, including one of my favorite actresses, Marcia Gay Harden. Thank God she wasn’t right for the part.
ROBERT ILER (Anthony “A.J.” Soprano): I was 12 years old. It was the first thing I’d ever done. [During read-throughs] David would come up and rub my head. When he would show up on the set to watch one of my scenes, it was kind of like when my dad would show up at one of my baseball games when I was a kid. You swing a little harder—you want to hit a home run.
JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): The first time I auditioned, I wasn’t doing it right. I stopped halfway through, and I thought I was doing this shitty, and I decided, I’m not doing it anymore. I’ll come back and do it again. So they invited me back and put me on tape; then I went in front of HBO, and I was in this room full of people, auditioning, and then I got the part, which I was totally surprised by.
STEVEN VAN ZANDT: So David goes, “Sorry—any other part you want, you can have it.” I said, “You know what, now that I think about it, I feel kind of bad taking another actor’s part here. I’m a guitar player. These guys, they go to school, they go Off Broadway, they work for 5, 10 years honing their craft and being waiters and whatever.” He says, “All right. I tell you what: I’ll write you in a part so you’re not taking anybody’s job.” I said, “Well, I have a couple of treatments I’ve written, one about an independent hit man that had retired, Silvio Dante.”
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): After we shot the pilot, David said, “Well, that was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, no one will ever watch this show, but you guys have been great.” And that was the end. Or so we thought.
In Which We Go Inside the Writers’ Room
DAVID CHASE: They’re just long, drawn-out bullshit sessions. You know you have work to do—it’s 9:30 in the morning and nothing’s been done and no one’s up for doing that. And this bullshit session starts and endures all the way until early evening. And out of that bullshit usually comes a story.
MATTHEW WEINER (writer, executive producer): When I arrived at The Sopranos, Season Four was on the air, and Season Five was starting. I’d written a script called Mad Men, and my agents kept sending it to HBO, and it kept getting turned down. Finally, my manager got David’s agent to give the script to David. So I talked to David on the phone and told him how I thought The Sopranos was like a Russian novel, and he told me how he’d never read any Russian novels. And then we talked about Mad Men for like an hour. And I hung up the phone and thought, Well, whatever happens, that was really cool.
DAVID CHASE: I would always go away before the season even started and come back with a whole, overly complicated story arc for the characters. It started out very simple, just for Tony. Then as the years went on, I would do one for Tony and one for Carmela, one for Chris Moltisanti. Tony would have three story arcs by Episode No. 13; Carmela would have two or three; Chris would have a bunch. You’d lay them out and see how they’d all line up. Sometimes you’d see a resonance in the stories, and sometimes not. So we would start to work it out, and people would start to bullshit, me as soon as anybody.
TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): Sometimes I’d be pitching, and I’d go on and on, and I’d look over, and David would be sleeping. And then we would just quietly leave the room and allow him to sleep. Sometimes he wasn’t sleeping, though—he just had his eyes closed and you thought he was sleeping. It was magic. He’d say, “O.K., I think I got it.” He would get up and he would just start writing on the board: Scene One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
MATTHEW WEINER: The first time I typed “Tony” on my computer, I thought, Holy shit! I can’t believe there’s a chance they’re actually going to say this.
TONY SIRICO: I lived with Ma for 16 years before she passed. David knew that going in. That became one of my story lines. Sticking to the script—that was Rule No. 1. They got the words from us anyway. We’d have the writers sit and talk with us. They heard the cadence of my voice and what I said, and how I expressed myself—you know what I mean? So I had guys put down my own words and shove them right back into my throat.
JAMES GANDOLFINI: I mean, come on. I used to call them the vampires, the writers. Say, what have the vampires come up with this week? What blood are they sucking this week?
In Which Actors Start Getting into Their Characters
LORRAINE BRACCO (Dr. Jennifer Melfi): I was not ready for how fucking difficult Dr. Melfi was to play. I am an explosive girl. I am loud. I am full of life and full of all kinds of bullshit, and I have to sit on every emotion, every word, everything, to play this character. I mean, I had to suck the life out of myself to play her. I mean, I don’t think Dr. Melfi ever smiled. I wanted her repressed and sad. And she also had to pay attention to not give an inch with Tony, because he would have eaten her up. I wasn’t going to let that happen. So I had that strength, but emotionally I suffered.
DREA DE MATTEO (Adriana La Cerva): It never really felt like we were trying to pretend that we were in the Mafia or that we were Italian. We were just a bunch of Italians that were there. Once the show took off and I started doing press, I never even let go of who the character was. I would keep my accent and everything.
JAMES GANDOLFINI: I’m still in love with Edie. And, of course, I love my wife, but I’m in love with Edie. I don’t know if I’m in love with Carmela or Edie or both. I’m in love with her.
EDIE FALCO: It was weird to sit down at a table read with the actresses playing Tony’s girlfriends. Occasionally I would get a sharp twinge at the back of my neck, because, especially if I’m tired, the emotional lines would bleed into each other and I’d have to kind of keep my bearings and remember, No, no, no, this is your job, and at home you have your life. Even years later, I remember when I saw Jim in God of Carnage on Broadway, and he was Marcia Gay Harden’s husband, and I had this “How come I have to be O.K. with this?” kind of feeling.
ANNABELLA SCIORRA: People were like, “We’re never going to like you, because you’re sleeping with Tony and he’s married.” People were really very furious about it. They also, on the other hand, would say, “When you threw that steak at Tony, you threw that steak for all womankind.” I remember when we shot that scene the crew all wanted to throw the steak. At first they used, like, a sponge steak, and then they used a real one, and that was easy. I had good aim.
TONY SIRICO: I got the script that I had to kill a woman, and I ran to David. I said, “David, don’t make me kill a woman.” He said, “No, you’ve got to kill her.” I said, “Then let me shoot her.” He said, “No, it’s got to be personal.” I said, “David, I come from a tough neighborhood. If I go home and they see that I killed a woman, it’s going to make me look bad.” He smiled and said, “No, you’ve got to do it.” Here’s the thing. We did the scene; I had to smother her. First he wanted me to strangle her; I said, “No, I’m not putting my hands on her.” He said, “Use the pillow.” After it was all said and done, I went back to the neighborhood, and nobody said a word. They loved the show; they didn’t care what we did.
TERENCE WINTER: When Uncle Junior was diagnosed with cancer, people were calling me up, saying, “Is he going to be O.K.?” I said, “We’re getting him the best doctors we can. Really, we’re on it.”
Concerning This Thing of Ours and How It Changed the Game
STEVEN VAN ZANDT: Two weeks into the show, I’m walking down the street, and three out of four people stop me, talking about Sopranos. Twenty-five years as a rock ’n’ roll star? Forget it. I’m like, Wow, this TV thing. Yeah, every cliché you ever heard about TV, I just witnessed it.
LORRAINE BRACCO: When people would call me “Doc” in the street—“Hey, Doc, how you doing?”—I knew the show had impact. The first couple of times I didn’t get it, and then I realized, “Oh my God, they’re talking about Dr. Melfi.”
JAMES GANDOLFINI: The fuss started probably middle of the first year. I went to a boxing match with some of the guys, and it was like this crowd just went, “Roarrrrr.” So that was like, O.K., it’s pretty big. I’ve had people from Romania, wherever, coming up to me and saying, “Oh, you know, my family’s like yours.”
TONY SIRICO: The second year, David gathers me and Jimmy and Michael together and says we’re going to Italy. I’ve never been to Italy. I was so happy. We went there, and me, Michael, Jimmy, Vinny Pastore [Big Pussy] … we had a day off while we were in Naples. Me and Vinny took a boat to the Isle of Capri. We weren’t off the boat five minutes when a whole family—maybe 15 Irish people—started in with “Oh, Paulie, Pussy!” We had no idea. That was the first realization that somebody’s actually watching this show. I wasn’t Tony Sirico anymore—I was Paulie Walnuts.
VINCENT CURATOLA (Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni): We did casinos, we did huge banquet halls—I think these people must have paid $100 apiece to get a picture. The fans were remarkable. And it’s funny because two years ago I went to a different church for Mass with [my wife] Maureen, and I got up to get Communion, and the priest looked at me and said, “Oh, Body of Christ, Johnny.”
TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): One F.B.I. agent told us early on that on Monday morning they would get to the F.B.I. office and all the agents would talk about The Sopranos. Then they would listen to the wiretaps from that weekend, and it was all Mob guys talking about The Sopranos, having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. We would hear back that real wiseguys used to think that we had somebody on the inside. They couldn’t believe how accurate the show was.
ALLEN COULTER (director): Sopranos gave the lie to the notions that you had to explain everything, that you always had to have a star in the lead, that everybody had to be ultimately likable, that there had to be so-called closure, that there was a psychological lesson to be learned, that there was a moral at the center that you should carry away from the show, that people should be pretty, that people should be svelte. The networks had essentially thrown in the towel on good drama. It’s like changing the direction of an ocean liner. But Sopranos did it. They changed the game.
ILENE LANDRESS (executive producer): The people who sort of fell the hardest [after the show ended] were the people who were not working actors. It’s hard when you get used to an amazing amount of attention. I’m not talking about Jimmy, Lorraine, Edie, Michael, Dominic, but the people who found a lot of fame very quickly. I mean, the kid who played Meadow’s boyfriend had been working in a deli slicing bagels in Westchester. And then after playing Meadow’s boyfriend and being on People magazine’s sexiest-man-alive list, it’s like, well, you can’t go back to slicing bagels.
In Which Big Pussy Is the First to Get Whacked
DREA DE MATTEO (Adriana La Cerva): The reason I thought Big Pussy was the perfect choice when they killed him off is he didn’t understand why he was getting killed off. I kept saying to him, “Man, it’s because you’re a great actor and you can handle the material and people are going to feel for you because you’re going to know how to play it out. And you’re kind of vulnerable.” There was a vulnerability to this big Mafia guy. People cared about him. You would probably care less if it was someone as cool as Silvio. And Steve Schirripa—there was a vulnerability to his character, too. They had a soft, creamy center, those big boys. But really, everybody was waiting to get the ax. It was a race to read the script.
TONY SIRICO (Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri): Killing Big Pussy—I’ll be honest with you. That bothered us. Actors don’t work every week, and all of a sudden Vinny had a movie—he said he needed the space to do this movie. This is the first year. They let him go. The second year, Vinny did the same thing, early on. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and they let him do the movie. But, hey, he only did two years on the show, and let me tell you, he’s still Big Pussy wherever he goes.
STEVEN SCHIRRIPA (Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri): If it’s time for your character to go, it’s time for your character to go—you know what I mean? That’s it. It doesn’t matter who you are. [Chase] made that statement when he killed off Big Pussy. This was a major character that just got killed. I mean, this wasn’t Friends. This was a real worry. You know, we would talk. “Did you hear anything?” You’re asking the writers. Nobody’s telling you nothing. Each time the script arrived, you go to the front, you go to the back, looking.
DAVID CHASE (series creator): I’d call them into my office and tell them how grateful I was for all the work they’d done, and that this was very painful for this show but that the story has to be served. And this is where the story has taken us—rightly or wrongly—for myself and the other writers. And the writers thought about it a lot. We didn’t do this easily or cheaply. We never fired anyone for dereliction of duty or for being difficult. It was a hard thing to do, but at the same time, I thought to myself, Well, I’m writing about a guy who’s the boss of a Mafia family, and he has to do these things, too.
STEVEN SCHIRRIPA: I lived in Little Italy for two years above a restaurant, Il Cortile. I have a plaque there. Sirico has a plaque. And that was where we threw a lot of parties, and we would hang there. That was kind of our home base. When we killed somebody off on the show, we had a party for them there.
STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): We lost Vinny Pastore, and that was the most difficult day up to that point. That was the only day on the set I can remember, you know, out of the whole 10 years where it was very uptight, a lot of tension on the set. I remember people yelling at each other and really pissed off, which you never saw. Why? Because we were losing Vinny. He was a beloved friend of ours, and you’re not going to see him anymore.
STEVEN SCHIRRIPA: Personally, I think the better they killed you, the better it was. Like Joey Pants went out with the head [in a fistfight]. Michael had a good one [by suffocation]. Mine was fantastic [shot looking at train sets]. But I think if they let you go with a whimper, it was a bad joke, instead of, you know, “Hey, we’re going to give you a good fucking send-off.”
ANNABELLA SCIORRA (Gloria Trillo): It was also kind of funny that everybody that was on the show, even after they got killed off, you would see them coming by for lunch. Nobody wanted to leave the family.
Concerning the Creator
JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): In one of the Mad Max movies there’s a huge, giant guy, and there’s a little puppet, a midget on his head. And I felt like I was the big guy and David was the guy in my head just walking me around for about six years. And you know what? It’s not a bad head to be in. I learned a hell of a lot about a lot of things from him. He has this laugh. It’s like a cackle. I mean, when you’d be doing a scene, and when you’d do something and hear him laughing over the monitor, it would give you this warm feeling—because if you’d make David Chase laugh, as dark as he is, you know, it was a beautiful thing.
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): I don’t exactly have a first impression of David, just that he reminded me of my dad, so immediately I had a comfort level with him that remained throughout all our years of working together. Whatever other people may have thought—he’s quiet, he’s intense, he’s slow to warm, or whatever—it’s my dad. I never felt, like a lot of people, “I always wanted to please David.”
STEVEN VAN ZANDT: Everybody thought I was doing the music for The Sopranos, but I made it very clear to everybody I had nothing really to do with it. Virtually it was all David. David comes from music. He was a drummer in a band—that’s what he wanted to do. He’s just a very musical guy, you know, one of the most musical of all the directors. There’s Scorsese and Jonathan Demme and Chris Columbus—there’s a handful who are really, really musical, and David’s one of them.
ALLEN COULTER: I did a scene in which Tony’s talking to Uncle Junior in the hospital, giving him some kind of advice, where Uncle Junior’s response is “Who are you, fucking Matt Helm?” When that line came up, nobody on the set, except me, knew who Matt Helm [a fictional government agent played in the movies by Dean Martin] was. And so Jim said, “Well, nobody’s going to get this. Can we call Dave—can we change it?” Well, you did not change lines; you didn’t change anything unless you got permission. Literally, not a word. So I called David, up in the writers’ office, and said, “David, Jim wants to know if we could change Matt Helm because he’s concerned nobody will know who it is.” And the phone was quiet for a moment. Finally David said, “Well, somebody will know.”
JAMES GANDOLFINI: 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? 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—it 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 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.
In Which Livia Is Remembered
EDIE FALCO: She had cancer the whole time we worked with her, but it was not spoken of. Nancy said to David, “Please keep me working. That’s keeping me alive.” One of the funnest times I remember is shooting a family scene with a lot of food in the room. It was like three in the morning at the end of a long day of shooting, and they had done Livia’s coverage and then they were doing my coverage. Here’s the camera, here’s Nancy, and she’s actually making faces and she’s eating a piece of pepperoni—slapping on her tongue—in the middle of my scene. She was trying to make me laugh for my coverage, like a little kid does right out of college.
ALLEN COULTER (director): As she got sicker, it was very hard for her to remember lines, which she found incredibly frustrating. Her reputation was that she could look at a script just for minutes and memorize it. So for her, this was particularly galling. I remember going to kiss her, at the end of her last episode with me, and she kissed me on the lips. There was something about that kiss that has really stayed with me all these years. I’ve always seen it as a statement: I am here, I am a woman, and this is who I am despite the evidence of years.
TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): We had already been writing our scripts when we got news that Nancy had passed away. Once we got past the pain about Nancy and started to talk about Livia, we realized she’s such a huge character in Tony’s life that it required its own episode. David said, “Well, I don’t think I want to write that.” I’m pretty sure it was me who lobbied and said, “David, you have to write this episode. I mean, nobody can write this except you.” He went off and did it, and it was just beautiful.
In Which Grumblings Are Heard
STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): I was sitting at the wrap party [after the third season], and we started to get a sense that this thing is really catching on. And I see David Chase, and he looks like a dead man. I’m like, “David, this is supposed to be a celebration here.” He says, “Yeah, sure, for you. I got postproduction, I got another two fucking months of work, and then I get my two weeks off, and then I start again.” I said, “What’re they going to do, fire you? This is fucking HBO. Take a couple of months off, so what—we lose the 12-month cycle? Who the fuck cares? We’re solid right now. They’ll wait 15 months.” And that’s what he did. And that fucked up the whole universe because that’s how we ended up doing seven seasons in 10 years.
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): There was a period of mutiny within the cast members, who thought we should be getting more money, and this was a very complicated issue, because I know HBO was making a lot of money. The actors were like, “Yeah, we need to renegotiate our contracts. We’re not getting enough.” There was like a sit-in, like the shutdown of the set. It was like “Occupy Vesuvio.” And I thought, Are you fucking kidding me? I worked at restaurants for 20 years, and this thing comes along and I’m going to complain about not getting enough money?
BRAD GREY (executive producer, co-founder of Brillstein-Grey): Whether it was on the HBO side, or the talent side, or the representatives, like everything else, there were negotiations full of testosterone. Because we were talking about the Mob—people started to actually believe they were in the Mob.
STEVEN SCHIRRIPA (Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri): After Season Four [when Gandolfini and HBO had a pay dispute and filming was delayed], Jim called all the regulars into his trailer and gave us $33,333 each, every single one of us. Now, there were a lot of big actors—Kelsey Grammer, Ray Romano—and they’re all nice guys, I’m sure, but nobody gave their cast members that kind of money. That’s like buying everybody an S.U.V. He said, “Thanks for sticking by me.”
In Which Adriana Dies (or Does She?)
TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): I went off for two weeks to write the killing-of-Adriana episode, and I couldn’t write a word. When it was three days to go and I hadn’t written a word, I just said “O.K.” and locked the door and didn’t get out of the chair for three straight days It was hard. We all loved Drea, but it’s a gangster show, and it was time to go.
DREA DE MATTEO (Adriana La Cerva): The episode was called “Long Term Parking,” and David said, “I’m going to film it two ways.” We shot one where I get away, where I don’t believe Tony on the phone [when he tells Adriana that Christopher tried to commit suicide]. You see me in my car and I’m driving away and I’m crying, and my suitcase is next to me. But we would shoot things like that, too, so that the crew and even the actors would not know the outcome of the episode. You know, I’ve seen the other episodes a hundred times. I only watched that episode once.
TERENCE WINTER: It was some really emotional stuff in the scenes with Tony and Christopher, and then, of course, the actual killing of Adriana. In that scene, we hear the gunshot, and the camera just sort of drifts up into the sky. I had written some of the most horrific, graphic violence on the show, but for some reason I didn’t want to see her get shot. And then a lot of people, of course, said, “Oh, she’s not really dead. Because they didn’t show it.” She’s dead, definitely.
TIM VAN PATTEN (director): Silvio drove her into the woods. When the car stops, she’s starting to plead for her life, and he grabs her by the hair and pulls her out of the car, and she starts to crawl away through the leaves, and she crawls off-camera as he’s taking out his pistol. And the gun cracks and you never see her again. That was a decision we made: it was to not see her die on-camera.
STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): Drea was a good friend and you’re not going to see her anymore, which I haven’t since. Shooting somebody’s easy. Putting your hands on somebody and pulling her out of that car? She looks like a tough broad in the show, but up close she’s a girl, O.K., and now you have to like manhandle her. And she’s a terrific actor, so she’s like, “Do it for real. Don’t take it easy on me.” So for—whatever—six hours, you have to beat this girl up, drag her out of the car, throw her on the ground. That was really difficult. I felt so exhausted at the end of that day. I said to Drea, “You better win the damn Emmy after all this, you know, make it worth it.” And she did.
DREA DE MATTEO: I think they had a dinner for whoever was being killed. I didn’t get any of that, maybe because I’m a girl. The duded camaraderie of a bunch of guys going out—they probably wouldn’t know what to do, to take some young girl out to dinner. And no women are really killed on the show, except for Adriana. Livia dies and Gloria commits suicide, but I was the only female ever to be killed on the show.
In Which a Further Account Is Given of Tony’s Charisma
DAVID CHASE (series creator): For whatever reason, Tony Soprano was very available and recognizable to a great number of people who had never gone near a mobster, who’d never eaten a meatball sandwich. They related to that guy; they saw who he was. Part of it has to be because of James Gandolfini, and the magic that he worked. His eyes are very expressive. There’s something about him that’s very caring, which you see in him no matter what he’s doing. There’s a sadness there. Maybe—and this is a real maybe—he has something in common with Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners. As cynical, bullying, vulgar, and overbearing as he could be, there’s still a little boy in there. He did a lot of mean things, and he enjoyed vengeance, but he didn’t seem mean. Something would happen, but in the end they’d get up and do it again, like believing there’s a million dollars in the Raccoon Lodge, or that he and Norton can come up with an idea to make a fortune. Tony was kind of like that—somewhere he believed that people were good. There were some roads he was not going to go down, because there was no coming back.
JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): I think you cared about Tony because David was smart enough to write the Greek chorus, through Dr. Melfi. So you sat there and you got to see his motives, what he was thinking, what he was trying to do, what he was trying to fix, what he was trying to become. And then you saw it didn’t really work out the way he wanted it to. If you took the Melfi scenes away, you wouldn’t care about this man as much, or care about anything that was happening to him.
MATTHEW WEINER (writer, executive producer): The casting of Gandolfini is very important because he allows us, because of his natural charisma, to enjoy all those fantasies of power that we wish we had. We love Tony because he has all of our animal appetites. Everyone would love to walk into a room and pick the biggest sandwich and take the best chair and have sex with the best-looking women. But at home he has the same life that we do. You can’t get any respect at home! That’s just the way it is.
DAVID CHASE: Many people said as the show went on Tony got darker and darker. I never saw it that way. The man was ready to smother his mother to death with a pillow in Season One. Granted, she’d tried to kill him, but he went up there prepared to smother her, but he was deprived of the opportunity. In Season Two, he shot his best friend [Big Pussy] at point-blank range. People thought the murder of Christopher was the last straw. But Christopher should have been done away with a long time ago. As a Mob boss, the guy was totally unreliable! Christopher just spelled the end of Tony, his family—everything. From my standpoint, as the architect of the series, Tony put up with him for too long.
JAMES GANDOLFINI: We’d get accused, back then, of glamorizing mobsters, but we were all half miserable, you know. I don’t think the violence looks appealing at all. Everyone paid for the violence in a lot of ways. I heard sometimes that we were making cute, cuddly mobsters, but I know for a fact David wrote an incredibly violent episode—the one where there’s a stripper that Ralph Cifaretto beats to death—and I think that was written as a reaction to that. It’s a very violent world, and, you know, there’s consequences. I think we showed it, and I think we showed the toll it takes on these people.
DREA DE MATTEO: I had a crazy crush on Jim when we were doing the show. We were all in love with him. He’s the sexiest TV guy ever, in my opinion.
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): You know, Jim’s a complicated guy. He never knew how good he was. He was always second-guessing, and trying, caring about the ways things came across. I knew almost nothing about his personal life, and he didn’t know anything about me either. He was just Tony—he really was fully inhabiting the part of this man that I was married to. And it was thrilling. Usually, if you look deep enough when you’re doing a scene with somebody, you can see the actor, and I never saw anybody but Tony. Never.
In Which Meadow and A.J. Are Heard From
JAMIE-LYNN SIGLER (Meadow Soprano): “College” was my first big episode. I remember I walked into the room where we would have our read-throughs, and Jim always sat at the head of the table in a big chair, and when I walked in to sit in my normal chair, he called me over and he said, “No, you sit in this one—this is your episode.” And so I sat in his chair.
ROBERT ILER (Anthony “A.J.” Soprano): I remember fighting with him, and he choked me and slammed me against the wall. And I was probably about 140 pounds, and I literally was lifted off my feet, like a cartoon. Afterwards, the second they said “Cut,” he would say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Are you O.K.?” You get so caught up in it, and the adrenaline is so up in the scene, you don’t even realize The next day, I woke up and all under my chin was totally black-and-blue. My jaw hurt, and the back of my head. And you don’t even realize it. He’s definitely a scary dude, but when you know him, and you know what a great guy he is, it all goes away. He’s like a teddy bear.
JAMIE-LYNN SIGLER: In the scene where Tony and Carmela tell us they’re going to split up, Robert and I both genuinely started crying. I remember it made me so sad. I looked at them, and it was one of those moments when you are really in a scene. You strive for that as an actor, but you’re not going to get that all the time.
On the Last Episode
DAVID CHASE (series creator): Ambiguity was very important to me. And the kind of movies that I was attracted to after a certain age were complicated, ambiguous movies—8 1/2, Fanny and Alexander, Raging Bull. No certainties. And network television at that time was nothing but a world of certainties. The Sopranos was ambiguous to the point where, to this day, I’m not really sure whether it was a drama or a comedy. It can be both, but people like to reduce it to one or the other. I know there are the two masks, Comedy and Drama, hanging together. But that’s not the way American audiences seem to break things down.
BRAD GREY (executive producer, co-founder of Brillstein-Grey): We talked a lot about it. There were a couple of different potential ways the series could end. We all know with the Mob it always ends one of two ways—it’s “the two forevers”: you either go to jail or you die. That’s the way it works in that life.
ALLEN COULTER (director): If you think about it, every other solution would have been predictable: Tony’s going to get killed; Carmela’s going to get killed; they’re going to kill each other. Meadow is going to turn him in; he’s going to go to prison. Or “I knew it! I knew Tony was going to get killed by Paulie Walnuts!” You name the solution, somebody thought of it. I would venture to say no one, in the entire world, thought of the solution he came up with.
MATTHEW WEINER (writer, executive producer): I loved it … It worked for me because—there’s only three possibilities: he goes to jail, he gets killed, he goes on. One of them is going to happen, you’re going to pick one, and who’s telling a story like that? What I think David was saying was that it doesn’t really matter. Tony’s with his family and your time with him is done. You tuned in here, and now it’s over. For me, I just loved that there was such an interactive quality to it. But the way the public behaved, it was like somebody took the bottle away from a baby. Outrage and shock.
LORRAINE BRACCO (Dr. Jennifer Melfi): I would have wanted it to end differently, but God knows we’ve talked about that ending for five years now—we’re still talking about it. People stop me in the street. “Did you get the ending? Did I miss something?” I thought it was very, very shrewd.
MICHAEL IMPERIOLI (Christopher Moltisanti): I thought it was a great ending. A lot of people hated it and thought it was a cop-out, but I thought it was the proper way. Knowing David Chase, he never liked to wrap things up neatly. I never expected it to be either a cliffhanger so people would wait for the movie or wait for another season or just some like really final thing. But I think he’s dead, is what I think. David was trying to put us in the place of the last things you see before you die. You remember some little details and something catches your eye and that’s it. You don’t know the aftermath because you’re gone.
TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): I watched 18 different versions of the last scene of the series finale. All very subtle variations on each other, but that was so painstaking, shot by shot by shot, and it took David weeks I think to put that ending together. I thought it was great. What I always took away from it was: when you’re Tony Soprano, even going out for ice cream with your family is going to be fraught with paranoia, and whether or not a guy comes out of that bathroom that night, eventually somebody’s going to come out of the bathroom somewhere. Maybe it happened that night, maybe it didn’t. But his legacy is paranoia and just that horrible distance that he lives in. I was shocked that people were so angry. It upset David that people would think, Oh, he’s trying to fuck with us. That it was David’s “Fuck you” to the audience. And David’s like, “I’m trying to entertain people. I’m trying to do something different that you haven’t seen before. I’m not trying to fuck with the audience.”
JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): When I first saw the ending, I said, “What the fuck?” I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that? But after I had a day to sleep, I just sat there and said, “That’s perfect.”
STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): I had to go on one of those nationally syndicated shows the next morning, so I heard from the whole country how upset they were. So I just started asking people, O.K., what’s your ending? Does the family get wiped out? Is that what you want? You want the kid to get killed? Tony to get killed? The wife? O.K., so what? And nobody could really say. I said, “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. The director said cut, the actors went home. That’s what happened.” It’s a TV show. It’s a fucking TV show, O.K.?
