More than 25 years later, it seems impossible to imagine anyone other than James Gandolfini in the role of Tony Soprano.
But The Sopranos creator David Chase was initially worried the actor wasn’t “threatening enough” to play the mafia boss in the acclaimed HBO drama series that ran for six seasons from 1999 to 2007, according to an excerpt from Jason Bailey’s Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend.
“Oh my God, I think I have Tony Soprano,” Gandolfini’s manager Nancy Sanders recalled after reading the script in the excerpt shared by Vulture.
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“All right, here’s the deal,” Chase told her after watching Gandolfini’s reel. “I think he’s brilliant. I have one concern, and that is, Is he threatening enough?”
Sanders quickly shut down that thinking. “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,” she explained.
Casting directors Georgianne Walken and Sheila Jaffe recalled Gandolfini “was really our favorite idea from the beginning.”
The late Gandolfini recalled in the excerpt, “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.”
Although the actor worried Chase was “going to be a pain in the a—” after inviting him to breakfast, the pair quickly hit it off, bonding over their mothers.
“When he finally settled down and really did a reading, it was just obvious,” said Chase, but Gandolfini wasn’t sold on the HBO series, which eventually earned him three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe.
“Why am I doing this? I came to you to do f—ing movies,” he told Sanders. “And now I’m doing an HBO series? I don’t even know what the network is!”
She assured him, “Jim, listen to me. This is the best piece of writing I’ve ever read, whether it be TV, film, or theater. I promise you: This is worth doing. It’s not going to change the world, but it’s going to change TV.”
Although Gandolfini was convinced he’d “be unemployed in less than a year,” he reluctantly signed on to play Tony Soprano with a “Fine. F— it.”
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