James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano

by Bischoff, Dan

  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 should have 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, “e
verybody 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.