Why we still can’t ‘fuhgeddabout’ ‘The Sopranos’ 20 years later

On Jan. 10, 1999, a little-publicized drama series called “The Sopranos” premiered on HBO, chronicling the domestic and professional life of a ruthless North Jersey mob boss living in suburbia with his wife and two teenage kids — and seeing a shrink for his anxiety.

Its large ensemble cast, including James Gandolfini as titular mob boss Tony Soprano and Edie Falco as his wife, Carmela, was largely unknown — as was series creator David Chase, whose TV résumé included “The Rockford Files,” “I’ll Fly Away” and “Northern Exposure.”

“The Sopranos” changed the landscape of cable television and won a slew of Emmys (including three apiece for Gandolfini and Falco) during its six-season run. It ended with an ambiguous, WTF? cut-to-black series finale in June 2007 — panicking 12 million viewers who thought their cable crapped out and leaving Tony Soprano’s fate forever open to interpretation.

I spoke to several of “The Sopranos” cast members, who shared their thoughts on their patriarch, Gandolfini, who died suddenly in Italy in June 2013 at the age of 51; their favorite episodes; and the groundbreaking series overall as it turned 20. Now, the show is marking its 25th anniversary on Jan. 10, 2024. 

How It Changed Their Lives

Edie Falco: It’s like you want to be a race car driver and the first thing they hand you is a Lamborghini. That’s what [“The Sopranos”] felt like to me. It remains a very specific chapter in my life with tremendous emotional reverberations, still.

My family kept trying to tell me [how good the show was] and I told them, “Stop telling me that stuff because it’s just going to mess with me — I don’t know where to put that information.” I felt maybe I really don’t know what I’m doing or maybe they’re going to find out I don’t know what I’m doing. If too many people start looking at this too closely, maybe I’m screwed. I still get waves of it now, when people say, “Do you realize what a cultural phenomenon ‘The Sopranos’ was?” It still feels unusual, is really all I can say.

Tony Sirico (Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri): The whole show was real. You needed some humor. People were getting killed left and right. Paulie made you laugh, but he killed a few people on the show. Without a doubt, he put me on the map until the day I die.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow Soprano): It gave me another family, stability and security during a tumultuous 10 years as far as my personal life went. I think that, in very many ways, had I not had just the show, but also the support that I had from all those people throughout all those years, I might be a different person. I really feel like that experience had a big part in shaping who I am.

Vincent Pastore (Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero): We would all hang out over at the West Bank on 42nd and Ninth and have lunch and do theater downstairs. One day, the owner came over and said, “Did you see what they did for you down at the corner?” So we walked to Times Square — me, Dominic Chianese and Tony Sirico — and we saw the big [HBO “Sopranos”] ad of us and we said, “What?!” It was insane!

Falco: Carmela seemed like the uber-mom. I know women like this . . . who really are happiest when taking care of other people. She ran that house, she bossed Tony around, she was really in charge and had total confidence in her ability to do that. It was just part of her DNA.

David Chase reminded me a great deal of my father; I put him in that place in my head. My father was also sort of a small, very bright, very intense Italian guy, socially a little awkward but brilliant. There were a lot of times where I didn’t, in an intellectual way, understand a certain script or why Carmela was doing a certain thing, but I knew that David knew, so that was totally fine with me.

Favorite Episodes

Vincent Curatola (John “Johnny Sack” Sacramoni): I have to say my favorite episode is [“Long Term Parking”] where Tony and Johnny have a nighttime meeting in a parking lot. After like eight hours of shooting, Jimmy turns to me and says, “You’re either a really great actor or a complete psycho,” because I came at him when it was my close-up and I just tore into him. I said, “Maybe a combination of both — you [as Tony] piss me off occasionally.” It was one of my favorite shooting nights.

Dominic Chianese (Corrado “Uncle Junior” Soprano): One moment that stands out for me is [in the episode “Where’s Johnny?”] when Tony asks Junior, “Don’t you love me?” I let him know that I really did love him, but I was just critical of him. I remember when I saw the [postproduction] looping on that scene, I couldn’t believe how powerful it was — I was in tears.

Steve Schirripa (Robert “Bobby Bacala” Baccalieri): Obviously, “Pine Barrens,” which is one of the first times they gave me something to really do with the guys. Also the episode when we went upstate to the lake house [“Sopranos Home Movies”]. I enjoyed that one. Bobby and Tony had the big fight; Jim and I were friendly and it was hard to do that . . . but we were really going for it, choking and pulling hair and all that stuff fat guys do when they fight.

Sirico: “Pine Barrens.” You can raise the American flag right alongside it. And “Eloise.” It was my mother’s favorite episode before she passed. She liked the fact that Paulie got the [restaurant] rolls back for his mother. [Tony to his mother’s friend Minn: “These Parker House rolls? They belong to my Ma!”] She thought it was silly and stupid and she laughed . . . that her son was dead and [the] center [of attention]. He knew those rolls.

Pastore: “Funhouse” [the episode in which Big Pussy is whacked on a fishing boat by Tony, Paulie and Silvio Dante]. That was probably my favorite moment. It was delicate and was just written well and . . . it was a nice way of me leaving the show. I always said to myself that, yeah, [Big Pussy] was knocked off in the second season, but David Chase and all the writers gave me such a great second season. That scene when Paulie says to me, “You were like a brother to me” and Tony says, “To all of us” — that was all truthful stuff, the way we were personally involved with each other’s private lives and the way we worked.

Memorable Moments

Sirico: “The Sopranos” just happened. I remember that I’d met this hard-nosed guy outside. It was David Chase. I went over to him and said, “Mr. Chase, I’m Tony Sirico. Anything you need from me,” and I got really close to him, “anything at all . . .” He looked at me and thought I was a nut, but then he saw me breaking balls on the set and hanging with the guys.

Chianese: I’ll tell you a wonderful story. I was going to Rao’s [restaurant] once and there were four ladies sitting on chairs. It was springtime and the show was a major hit. As I went by, one of the ladies said, “You! Why did you shoot your nephew?” I said, “Was I in my right mind when I shot him?” She said, “No.” I said, “There’s your answer.” People really believed the show, that’s how good it was.

Sigler: My first big moment was when I filmed the college episode, which was sort of Meadow’s first big moment, and I had a lot of one-on-one time with Jim. I remember him giving me a lot of acting lessons in the sense of what I could ask for, as an actor, on the set.

The final scene I shot at Silvercup Studios. It was a very simple thing of having me enter a room and leave, and they asked me to do it again and I was kind of confused as to why. When I did another take, the entire cast and crew and all the producers came down from their offices and said, “That’s a wrap on Jamie.” I still get emotional talking about it now — just looking out at the hundreds of people that had meant so much to me. The only words I could get out between my blubbering snot and tears were “Thank you.”

Schirripa: I came on the show in the second episode of the second season. I had no [acting] career before that. I was the full-time entertainment director at the Riviera Hotel [in Las Vegas]. “The Sopranos” didn’t know I had another job and the hotel didn’t know I was on “The Sopranos” while I was [first] shooting it.

I especially remember this: It was me, Dominic and Jim doing a scene in Newark in Junior’s house. I remember we rehearsed it and Jim said, “Let’s go back to my trailer and run the lines.”

I was there with Dominic and Jim and I’m saying to myself, “How the f- -k did I get here?”

It was like an out-of-body experience — I’d just watched the show on TV and now I’m in Jim’s trailer.

I met [“Sopranos” co-star] Little Steven [Van Zandt] at the reading. I was always a big E Street Band fan, and the night of the [season] premiere at John’s Pizza, Little Steven came up to me and said, “You wanna meet Bruce?” I was saying to myself, “Bruce Springsteen just saw me act.” That’s what runs through your head.

I remember after shooting my first episode, at the end of the night, Jim got out of his SUV, shook my hand and said, “We’ll see you again.” That season I did six episodes.

Curatola: I brought [“Sopranos” writer] Terence Winter to Hackensack Medical Center and got him hooked up with an oncologist who told Terry what Johnny [who was battling cancer] would look like at certain points, what medications he would be on. Then we had the good fortune to bring in [acclaimed director] Sydney Pollack [who had a cameo as a doctor-turned-prison custodian who encounters Johnny before he dies]. That was a highlight of my working on “The Sopranos.”

The Legacy

Chianese: One of the funniest things happened: We were in France at a very romantic-looking and beautiful hotel, and I walked out on the balcony and said to myself, “Oh, my God, I’m in the movies here, what am I doing in Paris?” And I looked over to my right — I expected to see maybe Sophia Loren or Katharine Hepburn — and Jimmy [Gandolfini] walks out in his robe, in his underwear, smoking a cigar. He looks at me and I look at him and we start cracking up. It was a great moment, funny as hell.

Schirripa: Dominic [Chianese] has always got a place in my heart. I worked with him, mostly, at the beginning and he was very patient with me, very soothing. He couldn’t have been more nurturing. I was very lucky to get to work with him at the beginning.

Sigler: What I was dealing with in real-life stuff . . . I had an eating disorder and then I went through a divorce and privately, I was dealing with my MS diagnosis. The show gave me a safe place where I felt like these people who I regarded so highly and admired so much still loved me and supported me.

Pastore: The mob movies were really starting to peak — you had “The Godfather” trilogy then “Goodfellas,” the movies like “State of Grace” . . . so for people to be able to sit at home on Sunday night and watch a story about a mob family, it was really due. “The Sopranos” filled that void.

Curatola: I think people who watched and fans said to themselves, “I wish I was Tony Soprano — I don’t have to punch a clock, I make 100 grand a week and I have people I hope are loyal.” To me, in that subculture, that’s what’s golden to these guys: “My God, gee, I wish had a crew like that, I could call up Paulie at 3 in the morning and he’ll take care of it for me.” It’s that power play.

I‘ve always had the thought that when you look at guys like this [on “The Sopranos”], they never go to court — they settle everything very quickly. It’s about who has all the toys at the end. Maybe, to a degree, they wanted to give the impression that they were doing the right thing by other people. Even Tony Soprano said, “F–k it. What’s it all about? To put food on the table for future generations.”

Sirico: We sat around the table [for the read-throughs] for [one] week’s script and broke balls before David came down. All of us. It was like a family when it came to the read-through, with all the faces and the humor. It was absolutely beautiful.

Falco: A couple of summers ago, Aida [Turturro] and I decided to sit down and watch the series, all the way through. There are many I still haven’t seen and others I saw when I shot them. But we couldn’t do it; we got four episodes into the first season and it was too much, it was too hard to watch it and go on with your day. It brings up too much — I remember that day or how I needed a costume or this one was in a bad mood or whatever the hell it was. Maybe someday I can do it.”