Posted on 09/08/2024 5:56:18 PM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
James Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano remains one of the greatest TV performances of the last 25 years, but working on the show day in and day out proved extremely taxing for the gifted actor.
James Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano remains one of the greatest TV performances of the last 25 years, but working on the show day in and day out proved extremely taxing for the gifted actor.
"Every other day, we would go to a bar. We would have the exact same conversation,” Van Zandt explained. “We would get drunk. He’d say, ‘I’m done. I’m not going back.'"
“I would say, ‘Okay. You’ve got a hundred people depending on you here,” he continued. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay.’ He would come back. But a few times, he would disappear for a few days. You know, it just got to him.”
(Excerpt) Read more at people.com ...
Gandolfini was a cokehead and unstable.
“The actor, who died on June 19, 2023 at age 51 from a heart attack, earned three Emmy Awards for outstanding lead actor in a drama series for his powerful portrayal of Tony.”
People can’t even get a date right.
It was also something I could not watch on a regular basis. The characters were all disgusting monsters who got away with their crimes. It was like watching a series about successful Gestapo agents.
Yeah, I know. I live in the past, an unrealistic past where the good guys won every time.
Never watched the program. I guess I got my fill of watching criminals every day working in NY State’s prison system all those years. Never watched Breaking Bad either. Didn’t care to watch programs that glorified criminal behavior, or tended to justify criminal behavior, like in Breaking Bad, a teacher with cancer distributing drugs to set his family up financially after he was gone. I retired in 2003, and still won’t watch any programs or movies that take place in prisons. Having worked in that environment for 25 years, I got tired of seeing scenarios presented, that I knew would never actually happen behind bars, never heard of happening, or never saw myself.
Whaaa ... every struggling actor should be so lucky, to have such a part/opportunity.
Thanks for you service. That was a tough career!
Well, THERE'S a word picture.
FTTW
Easy....
What really got to him was a cardiac arrest.
God bless
In the acting world being a villain is the way to stay employed. If you get really good at a long running role you will get typecast. Being typecast as a villain means you will never run out of job offers. Just look at Christopher Lee. He got major roles in major movies right up until he died at the ripe old age of 93!
People watch that stuff because they like darkness more than light. I was always disappointed when Rush would talk about that show. I would turn the volume down for a while because I didn’t want to hear about it.
There’s enough wickedness in this world to see and hear about in day to day living, without intentionally seeking out more brain rot.
It's not my thing.
-PJ
Still a favorite series.
Mr. Van Zandt (or should I call you Silvio?), no one is buying old E Street band music? Maybe Edie Falco can get you a gig voicing Humane Society beggar ads.
It was probably the first porn program to go mainstream. Heard so much about people talking about it and it was on the onscreen menu back in the day during a free preview time for the network - turned it on to see what it was...the scene playing at the time I turned it was a man running his mouth over a woman’s bare breasts - full on porn - nothing simulated about it.
Porn with a “good story and good writing” is still porn.
Some actors are born to play just one roll and that’s it for them and I think for James Gandolfini Tony soprano was his role. I saw him and other stuff, but I didn’t think he was that particularly a gifted actor. In other roles he was okay, but good in that one roll.
He was kind of similar to Ray Sharkey, Ray Sharkey had great success, playing the mob boss Sonny Steelgrave on Wiseguy. And in someways, I thought he was better in the role than Gandolfini was as Tony soprano.
But I will say that Ray Sharkey could actually play other roles and was a really good actor like Gandolfini he had a terrible end
Yeah I was thinking it was much longer ago. They were off by a decade
Have you talked to anyone lately who still works at DOCCS? It has turned into a real crapshow.
If things keep going the way they are, we may see 1979 all over again, or even a prison turn upside down. It’s that bad.
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