David Chase had reservations about casting James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in his series The Sopranos, it has emerged.
A new book by Jason Bailey, Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend, delves into the life and work of the late actor, who died from a heart attack in 2013, aged 51.
Broadcast by HBO, The Sopranos ran for six seasons between 1999 to 2007. Today regarded as one of the greatest and most influential TV series of all time, it was a star-making role for Gandolfini, who won three Primetime Emmy Awards for his performance.
In an excerpt published by Vulture, Nancy Sanders – one of Gandolfini’s managers – recalled reading the script and realising that he was perfect for the role.
“I went, ‘Oh my God, I think I have Tony Soprano,’” she said.
However, while Chase, who created, wrote and executive-produced the show, agreed that Gandolfini was “brilliant”, he apparently had one doubt in casting him as Tony: “I have one concern, and that is, is he threatening enough?”
Sanders said she was taken aback by this and quickly assured him that Gandolfini was more than capable of playing the menacing mafia mobster.
“David, if your only concern is, is he threatening enough,” she began. “If you said to me, ‘He’s a little chubby’ or ‘He’s losing his hair,’ I could understand. But he’s threatening enough. This is your guy.”
Gandolfini himself was also uncertain whether he would land the role, and also feared that Chase would be “a pain in the ass” to work with.
The excerpt quotes him as saying: “I think my exact words were, ‘I could kick this guy right in the ass, but I’ll never get cast. They’ll hire some f***ing pretty boy.’ I thought they’d hire, you know, one of these Irish-looking guys who are all over TV now.”
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The casting process ultimately whittled it down to three contenders: Gandolfini, Mike Rispoli and Steven Van Zandt, who was later cast as Silvio Dante in the same show.
Speaking to NPR about why he wanted to write the book, Bailey said he felt Gandolfini was an actor of “tremendous skill [but also of] incredible range, which I don’t think people talk about as much”.
“You know, Tony Soprano and The Sopranos had such an outsized influence and sort of cast such a giant shadow over television and over popular culture in general that Tony Soprano is what everyone thinks of when they think of James Gandolfini,” he said.
“And I understand why that is. But I felt like his story was one of – first of all, of a working-class actor who considered himself a character actor and aimed only to be that and was sort of – became an unlikely star, which I think is always of interest to people, who struggled after that show ended to continue to grow as an artist in spite of sort of the box that that show put him in, which I think is fascinating.”
More than anything, Bailey said, “I would hear these stories, mostly after his passing, from friends, from colleagues of his tremendous character, of his personal generosity and kindness. And I certainly was fascinated by the sort of incongruity between that and the persona of his most famous character.”
Last year, Gandolfini’s The Sopranos co-star Michael Imperioli shared a heartfelt tribute to mark the 11th anniversary of the actor’s death.
