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

by Bischoff, Dan

  How he got that across on the home screen was a private matter, however. Like a lot of serious dramatic actors, he hated the froufrou and flattery of publicity and promotion. That stuff seemed to eat away at his self-esteem, rather than buck it up (in that he was again like Brando, and a lot of other tough-guy male leads, including Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin). There was something that kept him from wholeheartedly accepting his celebrity or the privileges it could command.

  Well, some of them. The ones that weren’t, you know, Jerseyan.

  Vanity Fair once asked him about what it was like to go from being working class to international celebrity wealth (he left an estate valued in the press at anywhere from $6 million to $70 million at his death). Gandolfini mulled the question, hemmed and hawed. “Money is good! So I’m very happy about that,” he announced at last. “All the fuss during The Sopranos really was pretty ridiculous. None of us expected it to last, and it lasted almost ten years. Honestly? I don’t think I’m that different. I’ve lived in the same apartment for years. I’ve kept a lot of the same friends. I’m still grumpy and miserable.… But in a good way!”

  It was as if, after thinking of himself as a struggling actor for so long, Gandolfini didn’t want to lose touch with who he was. He did stay loyal to old Jersey friends, even as he started hanging out with the likes of Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt. Friends like Tom Richardson, now an executive at Attaboy Films, Gandolfini’s production company, and Mark Ohlstein, a chiropractor, and Vito Bellino, an ad executive for The Ledger. They’d hang out with each other and their families, go to the beach, and watch Rutgers football together.

  Gandolfini did TV commercials for Rutgers’ Scarlet Knights football team as The Sopranos was reaching the height of its popularity. In 2002, he got Michael Imperioli, who played his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti, on The Sopranos, to direct one that showed Richardson, Ohlstein, and Bellino coming out onto the field at the fifty-yard line, congratulating themselves on how Gandolfini’s celebrity had gotten them “real close” to the action. They ask what it had cost him to get them there, and Gandolfini says, “Me? Nothing.” A moment later they’re shown holding the Scarlet Knight mascot costume, plus the two halves of the costume for his horse. Ohlstein looks into the camera and says, sarcastically, “Close. Real close.”

  Nobody escapes the Jersey curse—I don’t care who they think they know.

  Never hitting the top of your arc, always bumping against some invisible ceiling, is what Tony, and The Sopranos, was all about. James Gandolfini symbolized that inbred New Jersey pessimism, and made the rest of the world love him for it. Add a few more pounds and a hint of the anger and you’ve got Chris Christie, who may run for president in a few years, something I doubt anybody his size and temperament could have done before Tony Soprano.

  Most of the planet lives with its nose against the glass today, looking, the way New Jersey looks across the river to Manhattan, at someone’s more successful life somewhere on the other side of the screen. For white men of a certain age it’s almost endemic. The paradox of James Gandolfini’s life is that by expressing that feeling with frustrated passion, by making us care for the inarticulate longing of a very conflicted but common man, he was able to pass through the screen, move to Tribeca, become rich and famous—for about thirteen lucky years.

  * * *

  He didn’t make it look easy. In fact, Gandolfini, who decided he wanted to be an actor as early as high school, made it look very hard—like labor, actually. As if carrying Tony Soprano around inside you was like hefting a hod of bricks.

  On the set he’d hit himself, hard, in the back of the head, if he flubbed lines or missed his mark. As time went on the actor found it got more difficult to bring the same level of kinetic authenticity to the role. Sometimes he’d just hunker down in his Tribeca apartment and miss a whole shoot, only to show up the next day with gifts, like a masseuse for the crew, or some fabulous caterer for the lunch table. Once, after he’d landed a huge raise, he showed up and peeled off $33,000 apiece for everybody he saw, telling them, “Thanks for sticking with me.”

  Fellow actors did stick with him. They saw something special about his talent almost from the beginning. After he’d gotten his first real break, in the 1993 crime thriller True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino), and developed the reputation as an actor with an absolutely fascinating emotional range, Gandolfini seemed oblivious. He would have an acting coach, Susan Aston, with him on nearly every set, something hotshot movie stars rarely do.

  Aston met him in the eighties, when Gandolfini was working construction and as a bouncer in nightclubs in New York City. They became acting partners and friends. They met when they were both studying at Actor’s Playhouse, a center for method acting, and specifically the Meisner technique. They worked together until she delivered a eulogy at his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in June 2013.

  Meisner’s technique involves a series of interdependent exercises intended to use the actor’s life experiences to obtain spontaneity and emotional coherence. It’s a stage technique but, like all American method acting, it achieves its greatest effects in film. Sanford Meisner developed his method in the 1940s after leaving Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre in New York, which taught a variant of the Stanislavski system. Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, James Caan, Jeff Bridges, Alec Baldwin, and James Franco have all been trained in the Meisner technique, and it is often described as intense and demanding. Some actors, often those who wash out, describe it as abusive and psychologically invasive.

  In 2004, Gandolfini made an appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, a program on Bravo hosted by James Lipton, and gave the longest discussion in public he’d ever offered on acting as a profession.

  “I remember one thing [an early acting teacher] did for me that got me to a new level was—I had such anger back then,” Gandolfini said. “When you’re young, a lot of people do, everybody does. You’re pissed. And you’re not sure why.…’Cause you want to express something and you’re not sure what it is. Something happened, I think [the acting teacher] told a partner to do something to me. And he did it, and I destroyed the place. Y’know, just all that crap they have onstage. And then she said, at the end of it—I remember my hands were bleeding a little bit and stuff, and the guy had left—and she said, ‘See? Everybody’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. This is what you have to do. This is what people pay for.… They don’t wanna see the guy next door. These are the things you need to be able to express, and control, work on the controlling part, and that’s what you need to show.’”

  The distinguishing mark of James Gandolfini as an actor was his ability to find sympathy for the devil within the characters he played without, somehow, suppressing the deviltry. He learned to let people glimpse the monster of his temper as an actor and it was thrilling, so real did the emotion seem.

  There’s a single, twelve-minute-long scene in True Romance in which Gandolfini viciously beats Patricia Arquette to get her to tell him where she’s hidden the cocaine he wants. The scene—it took five days to shoot—is incredibly brutal. He pounds her face, throws her through a glass shower door, and repeatedly, gently, tells her why he is in complete control of the situation. Until, that is, she sets him on fire and kills him with his own shotgun.

  That scene is almost a movie in itself, a journey of character discovery with an astonishing denouement. But what stands out is Gandolfini’s thoughtful, almost playful attitude until the very end. The chilling way he clothes his anger in a slight smile, while not really hiding it at all. It’s a virtual audition for the part of Tony Soprano.

  The psychological tension necessary to maintain that characterization over several days of technical shooting was extraordinary, for both actors. They had to hit a balletic rhythm, and stay in character after several peaks and valleys of emotional intensity. The pressure on a film set can be intense—visitors, time limits, scheduling conflicts, all contribute to a hectic, distracting
environment. Gandolfini’s commitment to technique also demanded a complete immersion in the character to achieve his startling spontaneity.

  That may be why, as Aston says, it became almost a standard part of the process for Gandolfini to try to quit every part he ever landed. And that’s why Aston was there—to bring him back to the character. She’d be on the set, then go over the next day’s script with him that night. And they could be long nights—union rules say an actor has to have twelve hours off after every full day, so starting times each succeeding day get pushed farther and farther back until you are filming in the wee hours. He had a bag of Meisnerian tricks—Gandolfini once told the press that if you need to do an angry scene, “don’t sleep” for two or three days, or walk around with something sharp in your shoe—but his real secret was preparation. And a vivid imagination.

  Star actors are well paid for what they do, so we needn’t indulge in any false pity here. But many American method actors, especially men, begin to find trolling through such emotional depths increasingly difficult with time. A lot of entertainment doesn’t require it, of course. But that can only add to your frustration with the job. If there is this very difficult thing that you do very well, but it is taxing to do and there isn’t always a demand for it, you can develop a healthy contempt for the whole process. As Brando did, and Mitchum, too.

  “It’s a hard head to get into sometimes,” Gandolfini told GQ. “I have a lot of fun at work too, don’t get me wrong. I love the people I work with. But there are some days when you get to work and you’re not angry enough, and you have to kind of get angrier and that’s a little … when I was younger, it was much more accessible.”

  Maybe we can illustrate something about the Meisner technique, and method acting in general, with that always coyly self-referential production, The Sopranos. Toward the end of the series there’s an episode where Tony is recovering from being shot in the stomach by Uncle Junior. He’s worried about maintaining the respect of his crew in his weakened condition. He’s tried to compensate by hiring a driver/bodyguard whose obvious muscles—he drives around in a wife-beater and desert camo pants—is part of his job description. So Tony nerves himself up to sucker punch his bodyguard in front of the whole mob family, knocks the guy down, kicks him, and storms into the bathroom.

  There we see Tony lean over the sink, breathing heavily, and then suddenly vomit into the toilet. He returns to the sink, stares haggardly at himself in the mirror, and then breaks into a barely perceptible smile. He’s let the mob get a glimpse of the monster again; he’s created the impression he wanted. And then he vomits once more.

  For Tony, the scene is about keeping control with a clever stratagem: he’s intimidated the rest of the greedy sharks, and he’s glad he’s done it. But for Gandolfini, the scene is also a tribute to the Meisner technique. Giving us a glimpse of the monster is what actors do, too—as Gandolfini told the audience on Inside the Actors Studio, the best lesson he ever learned in acting school was that they don’t come to see “the guy next door.” Letting us glimpse the monster is what made him such a good actor—that sly little smile in the mirror recognizes that Jim’s done it again, and he’s proud of the effect.

  But finding that monster, bringing him up and putting him on the screen in a way that seems entirely convincing, does not come without some psychic cost. That’s the second vomit—the price you pay. Meisner preached using your personal history, your own sadness and pain, the real core of your own feelings, to create a convincing reality on stage or screen. James Gandolfini could bring up the authentic monster. But doing that for years can make you a physical wreck.

  “Violent roles?” Gandolfini said, in 2010. “Yeah. That’s all I got for a while. It’s okay. I’m an angry guy. I’m like a sponge. You wring yourself out and then you have none of that left in you for a while. It can be a good thing that way. I’ll do those parts again. It takes a toll though. Definitely takes a toll.”

  * * *

  Acting is a skill that some of us have and others don’t. And that skill can be improved with practice and discipline. But there’s no question that how you look, your physical type, shapes the roles you’re offered. When Gandolfini was auditioning for Tony Soprano, for example, he was sure the role would go to some “handsome George Clooney type, except Italian.”

  The contrast between Gandolfini’s career and that of another Italian-American movie star who also happens to be from a roughly similar neighborhood in New Jersey—John Travolta—is interesting in this way (Travolta’s dad, who lived in Englewood, sold Gandolfini’s dad automobile tires). Travolta’s big break came on TV too, on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter in 1975, when he was barely out of his teens. He’s played handsome leading men all his life.

  Gandolfini didn’t get his first sizable role, in True Romance, until he was thirty-two; he didn’t land his first lead role, as Tony, until he was almost thirty-nine (lucky for him the whole country, or at least its social conscience, seemed to be entering middle age at the same time). But it’s not a career path that predominates in entertainment. And, as he told Inside the Actors Studio, you’ve simply “got to work with what you got”—and it can be a blessing. “I wouldn’t have had the roles I’ve gotten if I looked like Peter Pan.”

  Of course, most of the people who make their living in front of a camera do look a little like Peter Pan. Looks and hype are twin pillars in the architecture of celebrity culture. Beloved as he was, Gandolfini nonetheless stood out (though not alone, of course) in the lettuce-eating film community. A doctor who’d never treated him told the press after his death that he was “a heart attack waiting to happen.” There were tweets after his death was announced calling him “fatty,” followed by a backlash against the tweeters. The New York Post ran a cover story detailing his last meal in Rome: “Gandolfini guzzled four shots of rum, two piña coladas, and two beers at dinner with his son—while he chowed down on two orders of fried king prawns and a ‘large portion’ of foie gras, a hotel source in Rome said.”

  One of Gandolfini’s first jobs in Manhattan was at an Upper East Side wine bar (“you could take home $100, $125 a night in tips there, and it helped if you knew your wine,” a friend who worked with him says). He worked in restaurants, clubs, and bars, like a lot of actors do, for years before he landed his first big part on stage. One of his best friends from his Rutgers days was chef Mario Batali, who started out cooking in a New Brunswick restaurant where Jim worked the bar. Later on, the actor would be a regular at Batali’s New York and L.A. restaurants, which specialize in Italian cuisine. The redheaded, portly Batali is also an expert in classical Italian cooking, and his ancestors go back more than a century in the West Coast Italian-American community.

  Gandolfini didn’t just serve time in the food-and-drink industry. While still in his midtwenties he was hired to manage Private Eyes, a big, high-tech, high-priced nightclub on West Twenty-first Street in New York. He was good at his job, managing a “whole crew of bouncers,” buying liquor, running the help staff. And managing the public, too. There’s more than a little Manhattan bouncer in Tony Soprano and many of his film roles.

  The caricature of the New Jersey good life—good food, drink, people, family—well, not everybody comes out of that looking like The Situation. New Jersey is often described as a “tribal” state, an archipelago of different ethnic cultures that persist even now. Among Italian-Americans who migrated westward along Bloomfield Avenue, away from Newark into the thinning ether of suburbia, the maintenance of the culture, and resistance to assimilation, is closely tied to family and food. The Sopranos devoted a whole episode to it.

  That Gandolfini was part of that culture contributed to the authenticity he brought to the role of Tony. As an actor of surprising range, he could find an authenticity in all sorts of characters. After all, he’s played a New York City mayor (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3), an American general (In the Loop), even the director of the CIA (albeit the first Italian-American one, Leon Panetta, in Zero Dark
Thirty). But many of the people who knew him well describe Gandolfini’s life as a search for authenticity, both professionally and personally. That’s why he tried to quit so often, because he feared he could not summon it; that’s why his performances have such an unexpected impact when he brings it. The number of times he called “bullshit” on acting and Hollywood and publicity departments would almost fill a book itself. He was serious about what he did.

  So there was no easy line on his life for the press. He had not constructed a pasteboard identity to go with the role of James Gandolfini that he tried to hawk the way so many young actors do.

  Oh, he’d thought about it. One weekend when he was first starting to find his footing as an actor on the stage in New York, he went home for dinner with his parents and sisters, and asked them if they’d mind if he changed his name to “James Leather,” so that fans wouldn’t come knocking on the Gandolfini door.

  “I said, ‘If I get famous, it could be a pain in the ass.’” They seemed to be mulling it over as he got up to go to the bathroom. When he came back, they were all laughing hysterically at the idea that Jimmy Gandolfini will become famous. “So that’s my family, you know?”

  It’s a common contradiction, the contrast between who you are and who you’re playing. Gandolfini never completely lost that conflict, again like so many great method actors before him. It made him an acrobat in pain, always the best show under the tent. It also made him intensely private, reluctant to talk about himself, and so a bit of a mystery to his fans, who perhaps could be forgiven for calling him “Tony” when they met in person. Gandolfini as an actor seemed totally unguarded, but as a man, there were walls.

  He made his name playing a series of thinking hitmen: Virgil in True Romance; Ben Pinkwater, a seemingly mild-mannered insurance salesman who turns out to be a psychotically violent Russian mobster, in Terminal Velocity; a gentle leg-breaker and bodyguard for gangsters in Get Shorty; a mob enforcer who turns on his partner, played by Alec Baldwin, in The Juror. And, of course, Tony Soprano. A little mystery probably helped the gregarious party animal get over in those roles. It certainly helped deliver the shock of Tony Soprano’s near reality TV presence for a decade.