On what would've been James Gandolfini's 60th birthday, spend some time with the legend in our 2009 'Sopranos' cover story
in 1988; it ran for only six episodes. He made plenty of money and became increasingly frustrated. At times, he began to hate TV, and he’d think to himself, “If I see one more establishing shot of a skycraper and then they cut into the office and talk for four pages, I’m going to kill myself.” On and off, he would vent these and other frustrations to therapists.
refers to their jeans in a recent song – and we are sitting next to a table of pop-culture detritus, including a Scooby Doo game, an Osmonds paperback and various old copies ofand she is just explaining about how she keeps the testicles for merly belonging to the larger of her two Great Danes in a small jar filled with formaldehyde and blue dye on a shelf by her bed next to her vintage editions of Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, when she screams.
The first season’s principal story arc – of the conflict between the depressed mobster and his mother – was the one Chase had mapped out years before, though when it came to it, he realized he didn’t want to kill the mother. She was too good alive. The one significant conflict with HBO was about the show’s title: They thought thatwould confuse people, that people would expect it to be about opera singers.
Chase says that HBO has imposed no limits on the show. But he sometimes wonders if they go too far – “Did he have to say ‘fuck’ three times in the last thirty seconds?” he will wonder – not because he’s worried about offending people, more that they might lose the sense of freshness and truth. He tells me this: “That’s the problem of television: the curse of the familiar. It’s the repetition. And yet that’s what people like. They want to see Kramer come in like this.
One of the other actors in this scene is Joe Pantoliano, a new cast member this season. They have to embrace at one point. People who enjoy thefilms will be pleased to know that, during one rehearsal, as Gandolfini embraces Pantoliano, he says to him, “It was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” Robert Iler and I talk in his manager’s office after school. He’s just been in physics class, but as he keeps missing classes to filmand never quite catches up with his tutor, he is adrift. “I have no clue what was going on,” he says. “If you miss one day in physics, that’s it.” Soon he’s going to be home-schooled: “Everyone says you should have a normal life and go to school, but I don’t think going to school is normal.
Gandolfini tells me later that he likes these scenes for a number of reasons. Partly because of Bracco: “She’s wonderful and she’s funny and she’s receptive to my weirdness and I’m receptive to her weirdness.” Partly because he thinks they’re good for the show. “I find them to be the Greek Chorus of the character,” he argues. There’s another reason. “Sometimes,” he says, “they explain to me what’s going on with the character.” And some of that even leaks back into his own life.
Gandolfini went to college in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for what he swears was one simple reason: “Keep Mama happy.” He did four years. “I had more fun than a human being should ever be allowed to have in college,” he says. Then he came to New York. “I managed some nightclubs, which I had no idea what I was doing. . . . I was pretty miserable at it. But I was learning a lot and experiencing a lot.” He did other jobs: landscaping, delivering. “All kinds of crap . . .
You seem like you might be the kind of person whose instinct is for the unexamined life and getting on with things. Michael Imperioli: I don’t, you know. I think Christopher has nine lives. I think he’ll be around a while.
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