When ‘The Sopranos’ Took Off, James Gandolfini Took Off Too

In Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend, Jason Bailey charts the life and work of James Gandolfini—a once-in-a-generation talent who found a lasting place in the cultural firmament with his Emmy-winning work on The Sopranos. But like the conflicted mobster he so aptly played, Gandolfini was a complicated man—and partway through his HBO hit’s run, the pressure of his job and his personal demons threatened to stop the entire operation in its tracks. In this exclusive excerpt, costars Edie Falco, Steven Van Zandt, and Steve Schirripa, as well as a variety of Sopranos crew members, recall the drama’s most challenging era.

The no-shows started during season 3. The stress of The Sopranos had weighed on James Gandolfini from the beginning; his costar Steven Van Zandt recalls spending “most of my time talking him into coming back the next day. . . . We’d have the same conversation at least once a month.” Van Zandt would reaffirm how lucky they were to be on such an excellent show, how few comparable film roles there were out there, and then he’d deliver the clincher. “Come back and do us all a favor, because you’re helping to employ, I don’t know, sixty people here?” he’d remind him. “So think of them every time you want to quit. Think of the other fifty people that are trying to make a living, depending on you.”

“So he would sometimes take a few days off, whatever,” Van Zandt says. “But he always came back. He always came back, and he was the most generous guy in the world.”

‘Gandolfini’ by Jason Bailey

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Abrams Press

The reasons for Gandolfini’s “days off” varied. Sometimes he was avoiding a difficult or embarrassing scene. Sometimes the difficulties of line memorization would send him into a tailspin. Sometimes he wanted to get an early start on a weekend of partying, which was increasingly his coping mechanism for his unhappiness at home; sometimes he hadn’t quite recovered from one of those weekends. “He likes to have a good time,” explains Sopranos script supervisor Christine Gee, “but sometimes, you know . . . some people don’t know when to stop.”

Whatever prompted it, the outcome was the same. The production office would get a call from the transportation department; the driver who had gone to Jim’s apartment to pick him up reported that he was not answering his door or his phone. “So that could throw a day into a tizzy,” says Steve Kornacki, then an assistant production coordinator, “because then you had to punt and you had to figure out what to do, until somebody got ahold of Jim.” As updates were relayed from his driver to the Teamsters co-captain to executive producer Ilene Landress—he’s up and around, he’s in the shower, he’s coming out to the car—the crew would do what they could: establishing shots, maybe, or coverage of his scene partners over his stand-in’s shoulder, with Gee reading Jim’s lines.

“Find something else to shoot or shoot what you can, as long as you hear he might be coming in,” explains location manager Mark Kamine. “You pull up whatever work you can do without him until he gets in, or says he’s not coming in. And then the Teamster tells the other Teamster who tells the producer who tells me, if I’m the one on set, he’s not coming in. And then the first question is, what can you do instead? And if you can’t do anything, it’s like, OK, go home.”

On the occasions when the driver could get him out of the apartment, albeit late and hung over, they would pour coffee into him to sober him up and get him camera ready, and take a shot at making their day (sometimes shooting his medium shots and close-ups simultaneously). “After the first time, there was a contingency plan,” Kornacki notes. “And I don’t think it happened a lot. But the producers were ready for it.”

“Look, it was difficult on production, obviously,” says cinematographer Phil Abraham. “I don’t remember ever getting a phone call saying, Don’t come in to work I remember specifically, Jim even giving them advanced warnings, like I’m not coming in tomorrow. And people would go, Ha, yeah, right. And he wouldn’t come in tomorrow! It wasn’t necessarily always like, he went out drinking that night and then disappeared. I mean, it was that a lot. But I know that playing this character was a huge burden on this guy. He was not this person. And yet he needed a release—it’s almost like the noise in his head was probably too much. Now, whether or not that’s the way one does it…”

The absences became cyclical over the next couple of seasons. “Time would pass, and the crew would all get kind of a sense of, Oh, we’re due for a day of absenteeism,” Gee says. “You would just get a sense, Wow, he’s been pretty good. He’s been showing up and he’s been doing the right thing. Next thing you know, boom—that would happen.”

“It’s a hard scheduling thing,” according to Landress. “The guy was working so hard, so much of the time, they were like, Okay, we’ll give them a three-day weekend. But I learned pretty quickly that he might go out on Thursday night. And so I’m not going to see him on Friday. So as much as I want to schedule to give them a break, you almost got to the point of not wanting to give them a break because you couldn’t know what would happen.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever been on a show where something like that has gone on, but this was sort of a different beast,” Abraham says. “At a certain point, HBO was fining him 250 grand a day. And he would say, Fuck it. I can’t come in to work. So we knew then, it’s not just him doing a lot of blow and drinking, and he’s not getting up because he doesn’t want to get up. No, it was deeper than that.”

“I’m not sane at all when I’m doing the show,” Gandolfini said in a 2001 interview. It was a question of pressure—the pressure of maintaining the quality of The Sopranos and his performance on it. Some of that pressure was external; much of it was not. “The guy was such a workaholic and put so much pressure on himself,” Landress said. “Jimmy was never going to give you a B performance. He was always going to give you an A performance. And if he felt like he couldn’t give an A performance, he was so hard on himself.”

Unsurprisingly, a perfectionist like Sopranos creator David Chase was often exhausted as well. “I was concerned, but I was also so sick of his bullshit,” he recalled. “They flew me back from France and then back. It was crazy. He was sick of me, too. Let me just say that. It wasn’t a one-way street. He could always find something humiliating and mortifying so he wouldn’t have to show up for something.” Edie Falco, meanwhile, had been diagnosed with breast cancer midway through filming a season of the show, and would frequently come to the set after a morning of chemotherapy only to discover that her costar was MIA. “It was infuriating to her,” Gee says. “I remember her getting just really irate, and saying how she’s struggling so hard to do all the right things to save her life, while he’s pissing his away.”

“Someone like Edie, or one of the other actors, who’s geared up and studied their lines, and maybe stayed up late to do that and gotten up early to go to hair and makeup,” Kamine says, “that’s not nice. And did he think about that? The night before when he was out partying? You know, but he couldn’t help it, obviously.”

“As I remember it, the feeling I had, overall, was empathy, that he’s going through something,” Falco says. “And if he could do better, and be on set, he would be. Nobody wants to be holding up a production, and nobody goes out hoping someday they can screw up a very complicated schedule. He’s . . . the guy’s in trouble. And coming from a place where there are quite a few of those people in my family, or there were, I have a great deal of empathy, sympathy, compassion. You wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

When he’d blow a day, or come in late, he was overwhelmed with guilt; in fact, the famous Friday night food spreads—elaborate meals from the Tribeca sushi restaurant Nobu, which Gandolfini paid for every week—were initially “sort of like an apology to the crew,” Gee explains. “He knew we all traveled to get there, and that we’re not getting paid for the day if we’re not working.” But she says their resentments were outweighed by empathy. “The crew understood that this was an illness. It’s not a light switch that you could just shut off.”

Gandolfini was grateful for the doors the show had opened for him, and the good work it allowed him to do, week after week. But by this point in the run, “there were regrets,” manager Mark Armstrong says. “A ‘be careful what you wish for’ kind of thing—as much as he loved the writing, and he really did, and he knew he was on a great show with great people—I think he wished it wasn’t as big as it was, and that people cared about him as much as they did.”

The late days and absences continued through the run of The Sopranos, Gee says. “It kind of peaked and then it tapered off, but it never just went away completely.” The more the pressures of the show and the darkness of the character were rattling around inside Gandolfini, the smaller the chasm between Jim and Tony became, the more he would require an escape hatch. “I just think, when you feel the weight of that much responsibility, or that the onus is on you for everything, then there’s got to be a release,” says collaborator and producer Chiemi Karasawa. “I feel like he must have sought relief and respite from that kind of pressure.”

“Jim did not spend a lot of time, I don’t think, attending to his own mental health,” Falco says. “I had a conversation with him once. I said, ‘Listen, no one’s gonna say, Jim’s probably tired. Let’s give him some time off. This is your job, to say, Guys, I need a month, we’ve got to shut down production for a month, I’ve got to take care of myself, or whatever.’ And he would never do that. The sense of obligation he felt, for a crew that would suddenly be out of work for a month? He was always looking at other people before himself, which I think he probably thought of as altruistic. But ultimately, it’s a form of suicide, you know.”

Or, as another costar, Steve Schirripa, puts it: “Sweet guy. Listen, not perfect. Not perfect. By any means.”