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

by Bischoff, Dan

  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.

  * * *

  “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?”

  7.

  Troubles on the Set (2000–2003)

  Five years after The Sopranos ended, scriptwriter Terence Winter, who went on to create the cable series Boardwalk Empire about the Jazz Age gangsters who built the Jersey Shore, told Vanity Fair that there was a sort of barbershop-mirrors effect to writing about the Mafia.

  “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,” Winter recalled. “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.”

  Forget about what the F.B.I. thought of The Sopranos. The real point here is that the mob thought it was so true that Chase or someone at HBO had to have an inside source—they thought there was a stool pigeon singing in David Chase’s ear.