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Revered for his taut, menacing portrayal of crime boss Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini was an electric, uncanny presence on- and off-screen like none other. And yet, the actor told Vogue in 2001, as the suspense of The Sopranos seized the country's attention, “I got lucky with this. I am playing an Italian lunatic from New Jersey, and that's basically what I am.” Upon the news of Gandolfini’s death yesterday in Rome, we revisit this profile of the man behind the iconic character. From the archives: See the photographs by Annie Leibovitz and read the story by Sarah Kerr.
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Not Just Another Wise Guy, by Sarah Kerr. From the November 2001 issue of Vogue:
On a flawless Friday evening, four nights and three days before two errant planes will darken and reshape life in New York, I have an appointment in a Greenwich Village garden with a man who occupies—to his own endless surprise—a privileged place in America’s blithe pre-blast culture. Is he late, or have I misunderstood the where and when of our meeting? I scan the passersby in the breezy, quaintly landscaped little park, but he is not to be found among the affluent young mothers with fidgeting toddlers or the middle-aged men perusing newspapers whose headlines now seem, with hindsight, enviably idle. After waiting a few minutes, I start to think I’ve made a mistake. Then I see him slowly gliding toward me: Though I have failed to spot James Gandolfini, he has seen me. As he ambles over to extend a hand, I can’t help thinking that, except for his electric physical authority, which identifies him as surely as a signature or a fingerprint, he looks disarmingly unlike the image we are used to from TV. The top of his head is wrapped in a blue paisley bandanna. He has on opaque reflective sunglasses, red plaid flannel over a gray T-shirt, plain tan pants, and casual brown suede shoes. It is a look that suggests a construction worker with a preppy side, or a graduate student who works out and has a rebel streak. What he doesn’t look like, in any way or shape or form, is a waste-management consultant.
Gandolfini wishes his work could speak for itself. (In fact it does, but it is the selfish habit of fans and the media to demand more.) He gives as few interviews as he can get away with but loyally wants to help out the Coen brothers, whose haunting new film, The Man Who Wasn’t There, opens in November. The film, a noir with a dash of science fiction set in the archetypal cute American town of Santa Rosa, California, in the late forties, stars a deliciously goofy, poignant Billy Bob Thornton as a washed-out barber who barely talks. Gandolfini plays more or less his opposite: a strutting peacock of a man, a snazzy dresser and theatrical show-off named Big Dave who brags about war exploits in Japan and may be having an affair with the barber’s wife (Frances McDormand). Big Dave is a classic American type—less complex and likable than Tony Soprano, perhaps, but more vital and innocent.
So, Gandolfini has agreed to discuss the movie and has suggested this little garden. It is a testament to both his charisma and the menace he projects when he comes upon strangers in public places in The Sopranos that meeting him seems more exciting, but also scarier, than meeting many other famous people. His manager has assured me that though he dreads interviews, once he has agreed to give one he will be polite and unaffected and helpful. And, indeed, he has gone out early to a landmark local bakery to buy buttery pastries and coffee with milk for two.
When you see Gandolfini in person, all the shocked TV-critic punditry about how he has transformed America’s notion of a sex symbol, enlarging it to include such unlikely attractions as a paunch and a balding pate, seems unnecessary. His posture is straight and tall, his face younger and fresher and more relaxed than that of his worried TV creation. He is a month and a half into his vacation from the grueling Sopranos schedule, a month away from starting back to work, and thriving on the downtime.
He is also approaching a proverbial career crossroads. This month, Gandolfini begins shooting the fourth season of the show that made him a star, and he has just signed on for a fifth. But he is also building on his career away from TV—and that means playing people other than wise guys. In the recently opened The Last Castle, he plays a strict military prison warden opposite Robert Redford’s suave anti-authority prisoner. Big Dave is a smaller part but key to the plot of The Man Who Wasn’t There, and played with panache. Gandolfini says that he appreciates the way the Coen brothers, like the people behind The Sopranos, know what tone they want and how to get it. He cracks up remembering the first time he saw Thornton transformed into a forties character, with waxy brows and shellacked, sculptural hair. “He looked like a young Frank Sinatra,” he says. And he mischievously implies that a crucial fight scene between them was fun to do because Thornton is so thin.
As he praises the Coens, one can hear his concern that future movie collaborations drawn up by Hollywood committee might not be so confident and smart and fun. “I’ve been spoiled,” he says again and again. Maybe so. Still, to meet him is to conclude that he hasn’t, and won’t, let it go to his head.
Besides the boundary-pushing content and the inspired acting, The Sopranos has enjoyed a richer organic connection to place than most TV shows. David Chase, the creator, grew up in northern New Jersey, and so did Gandolfini; when Tony Soprano goes to a boardwalk or restaurant or parking-lot location, he is sometimes revisiting a place Gandolfini knew when he was young. “Which is weird,” he says. I ask him if he ever sees the parent of an old school friend, for instance, walking down the street while he’s out on a shoot. He nods. “I see people. My sister works in Bergen County, so a lot of people are like, ‘Hey, I know your sister! I know this, I know that!’ It’s actually nice. It’s kind of calming, in a way. Because movies are crazy. So crazy. Especially if you’re doing a few of them a year, you’re traveling, you’re in hotels or wherever. This kind of grounds you a little bit. You realize it’s not such a big deal.”
Even apart from work, Gandolfini is still strongly attached to New Jersey, and a good portion of his friends remain there. “I think they’re Middle America,” he says of Jerseyans, “but they’re so close to New York and Philly that they’re sharp.” He stops, suddenly afflicted by an artist’s distaste for broad generalization. “I don’t know anything about Middle America, so I’m not sure. I just don’t know. But they’re good people—talk about a generalization!—and I like the place. I’d rather spend one day at the Jersey Shore than two weeks in the Hamptons.”
Gandolfini was born in 1961 in Westwood and grew up in nearby Park Ridge, a town he sums up as “mid-level” suburbia: people working in accounting or construction, a fair amount of them commuting to Manhattan, most generally doing all right. Though his parents worked in different Catholic schools—his father as building-maintenance chief and his mother as the head lunch server in a cafeteria—he attended public school. He speaks with moving respect of his parents, calling them “blue collar” and “serious.”
“My mother was like”—his hand forms a fist and he sits up tall, becoming a pillar of dignified strength. (This is something Gandolfini often seems to do in conversation—emphatically perform his descriptions rather than rely on limp and inadequate words.) His mother’s family ran a small bar in Milan. “She went through the war in Italy—I think she was about eighteen when the war happened. She was going to be a doctor. And everything got all screwed up and she had to come to America. I mean, think about this—this was the forties and she was going to be a doctor.”
For all her seriousness, Gandolfini’s mother did not try to steer him in any controlling direction. He had two sisters who were old enough to leave the house when he was ten or eleven, and after they were gone he found it a little too quiet to come home to. He began “to wander around, check things out.” All his mother asked was that he go to college, but even that was more than he felt like doing. “I really didn’t want to go, but she was adamant about it. And I ended up going to Rutgers, which was the state school of New Jersey—the easiest, cheapest thing to do. And the first night, there were, like, five keg parties sponsored by the school or something. You know: 5,000 people, 2,500 women and kegs of beer, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God. What was I complaining about? I was idiotic, I should have run here!’”
He ended up majoring in communications to this day he says he has no idea what that was about—but mostly college was a way to leave home and learn by observing new people. Gandolfini is somewhat vague on the period after college. By his mid-20s, he was running a nightclub. Through a charismatic school buddy, he met another friend, a young actor just starting his career: Roger Bart, nominated for a Tony Award this year for his turn as Carmen Ghia in The Producers. Bart invited him to sit in on a theater class in something called the Meisner technique. The assignment that night was to pantomime threading a needle while other students attempted to distract him. “You sit there, and you do these activities while someone bothers you, basically until you get so bothered that you scream at them,” Gandolfini says. “I was very frightened—not frightened, but really nervous and anxious, and it really angered me . . . . So I went back.”
For two years he studied acting at night, two sessions a week. And he began to do plays at tiny venues in downtown Manhattan, “working with young new writers in little holes”—a boot-camp apprenticeship that viscerally and sometimes painfully taught him the difference between what works and what doesn’t. “You try it in front of an audience, and you know right away if it stinks or not. They just go”—he makes a sickened, retching face—“and it’s like a wave. Or, if they’re with you, you know the energy—that’s the thing about theater—the energy is palpable.”
Gandolfini believes the tight pace of The Sopranos, with its dauntingly wide emotional range and constant, revolving-door exposure to new actors, has vastly improved his technique since those early days. And it has made him into a more mature, diplomatic professional. Though “whether that’s good or bad I don’t know yet. You know, being a professional sometimes means, ‘Aw, I don’t want to rock the boat, I’ll keep my mouth shut.’ You learn to pick your battles; that’s one good thing I’ve learned.” He recalls one time before The Sopranos when he was still a relative unknown, discussing with a network a possible TV role. He showed up for the first meeting with an unforgiving critique of the dumb script, and the network executives “immediately shut down, like they didn’t want to hear it. ‘This is what you’re gonna do.’ That was their attitude. And you know, at the time, you have to look at it from their point of view. I was really nobody, and I walk in and say, ‘This part blows and this part sucks and this is ridiculous.’ And they were like, ‘Who are you? Get lost. Go and look in the mirror, pal!’”
Gandolfini seems to delight in looking in the mirror, in fact, and laughing hard at the spectacle he sees. He even seems to need, in a way, to pop his own balloon. When I ask how he has stayed anchored in reality after shooting so fast to stardom, he says, “I probably have plenty of unreality that I don’t know about. I’m sure if you asked some people they’d be like, ‘He’s in a fucking world of his own; he has no clue what the hell is going on.’ But I do know that this happened to me late in life.”
Like many late bloomers, he appreciates what he has. One of the rare treats of working on The Sopranos, he says, has been the chance to play opposite formidable female characters. “My two sisters and my mother are all very strong women. Both sisters have very big jobs. We’re all a bunch of loudmouth bosses in my family. So I am not in any way bothered by strong women. If I’m pushed, I’m gonna push back.” He speaks of his costars with intense respect. Lorraine Bracco “is someone [who] when she works, she works 100 percent,” and Edie Falco is “wonderful. She has incredible, incredible strength, and I don’t even know if she realizes it.”
His judgment of himself is more startling. He dislikes interviews not because he has a prima donna’s feelings of having risen above them, but out of a kind of caution—an instinct to slow down the critical hosannas and adoring hype until he feels he’s caught up with them. “I don’t feel that anything’s been proven yet in terms of my career. I did a few movies, I got lucky with this; it’s good writing. And as I’ve said, I’m playing an Italian lunatic from New Jersey, and that’s basically what I am. So I don’t think I’ve proven anything yet. Maybe ten movies down the road, I’m doing well, I’m proud of my work, then I could see maybe getting out there a bit more.”
In the meantime, playing father to his two-year-old son helps him keep his balance. (Gandolfini got married in March 1999 to his longtime girlfriend, Marcy Wudarski, but does not like to discuss home life beyond saying, with a loving finality that forbids further questions, “Great woman, great mother.”) And when he can—not much during the shooting season of The Sopranos, more when he’s on a break—he reads. In fact, he has a handful of novels sitting stacked up at home that he thinks would make terrific films. “But it’s funny, because I don’t necessarily want to act in them. I don’t want to direct them. I’d like to help them become movies.”
Perhaps he might try his hand at producing someday. In theory, he might like to do theater again, but he knows that if he’s hired for a play it’s likely to be an explosive, draining part. “You need to be physically ready, emotionally ready.” On the other hand, in the theater actors swap energy back and forth with the audience, and when a show goes well they can wind up feeling renewed. “When you come off two hours onstage you’re tired, but you go out and eat and you want to talk and you’re like this”—he sits up and looks like an athlete ready to run a race. “Film,” he says, “you’re like this.” Sunken face, slumped shoulders. “Film sucks the en- ergy out and keeps it. TV’s the same thing.”
One part he’s thought about playing is that of Honeymooners star Jackie Gleason. He’s a huge fan but hasn’t decided whether Gleason’s life story has the proper three-act arc—rise, fall, resurrection—that makes for a compelling biography. And if he can’t guarantee that the project is done with respect, he may “leave well enough alone.”
Whether or not Gandolfini ever ends up playing Gleason, a comparison of the two actors is a rich one. As Gandolfini likes to point out, Tony Soprano is a “whiner” very much in the vein of Ralph Kramden. And for all the taut menace of The Sopranos, in terms of TV lineage Gandolfini has in some ways been expanding the tradition of the medium’s most brilliant comedians—geniuses like Gleason, Lucille Ball, and Carroll O’Connor who created extralarge personae that are both Every-man and almost superhumanly distinct. The difference, Gandolfini hopes, is that he has received enough critical praise to move eventually beyond acting on TV, where he might unfairly get boxed into a stereotype.
“So. You know where you’re going?” he asks as we start to wrap up. “Life is good?” The answer is yes—at least for now. A few days later, in the coverage of the World Trade Center disaster, I read that Gandolfini rushed out to volunteer in the Village. I think of our conversation, and the way he had of seeming serious and concerned underneath his brash humor, and of hoping he could express those sides in his acting; and it strikes me that overnight, for the saddest reasons, the time and the climate for his kind of substance may suddenly be right. In any case, if he calls himself lucky so are we, for knowing Tony Soprano for some time to come.