25 years after the premiere of The Sopranos on HBO, the performance that actor James Gandolfini (New Jersey, 1961 – Rome, 2013) gave to viewers, getting into the shoes of Tony Soprano, a mobster with anxiety attacks, is still considered one of the best performances in history from the television. The performer, who died in the city of Rome on June 19, 2013 due to a heart attack while on vacation, left an indelible mark on television fiction, which earned him three Emmy awards and a Golden Globe for best actor. However, fighting his personal demons meant that filming the award-winning series was not a bed of roses, especially in its final seasons. This is now revealed by Mark Kamine, head of locations in the series that lasted six seasons, in his new book On Locations: Lessons Learned from My Life On Set with The Sopranos and in the Film Industry. In its pages it explains that, during the filming of the fifth installment, Gandolfini's wear and tear began to cause problems during production.
Kamine relates several anecdotes from filming. One of them took place after filming an episode in New Jersey: “I was in the hotel bar when one of the crew members closest to Jim [Gandolfini] “He asks me if I want to go to Atlantic City with them.” Atlantic City was almost 130 kilometers from where they were, more than an hour by car, and the next day they had to continue filming: “I turned it down. The next morning, no wonder they weren't able to wake Jim up,” Kamine writes. In the end, he showed up four hours late “complaining and cursing every time he made a mistake with his half-learned lines, repeating take after take, drinking a lot of coffee and water, appearing at the same time embarrassed and rude, as he always did when he screwed up. that way.”
As the actor became “less and less trustworthy,” HBO allegedly “added a clause to his contract that made him responsible for the costs of the day of shooting if he missed work due to excessive consumption,” the author claims. from the book. According to Kamine, who later became the executive producer of another successful series on the platform, White Lotus, there were other anecdotes that made those shoots impossible: Edie Falco, the actress who played his wife, Carmela Soprano, was so fed up with Gandolfini's sit-ins that she felt frustrated with the actor and he, he felt frustrated with her perfection : “Edie always arrived early, was always prepared, and always instantly got into the skin of her character. She was an admirable presence on set throughout the entire series.” But, precisely, the actress's professionalism often intimidated her partner: “Jim seemed amazed and, at the same time, frustrated by how Edie got into her character, because he often arrived unprepared, cursing between scenes and asking the script supervisor to recite the lines he had to say.” However, Kamine admits, “everyone was willing to put up with the chaos” because “Gandolfini, more than anyone else, except David [Chase, el creador de la serie] is the one who made it The Sopranos whatever it was, with its expressive features, its rich interpretations and its gestures, at the same time threatening and restrained.”
More than a decade after his death, Kamine has not been the only series worker to speak out about Gandolfini's problems. In 2021, investigative journalist James Andrew Miller, known for reporting on him in Washington Post either The New York Timespublic Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, a book that tells the history of the American network and its way of bursting onto the scene to generate what was later called the golden age of television. In this book, which includes more than 750 interviews with actors, producers, managers and workers at HBO since its inception, he collected the management team's concern for Gandolfini: “We were worried that Gandolfini would die,” Jeff Bewkes revealed to the journalist, executive director of HBO from 1995 to 2002, “from time to time he would go on a bender or go on a cocaine binge and we would have to stop production.” Bewkes also claimed that THE ACTOR sometimes didn't even appear on set, which “was difficult for the other actors' schedules.” And he added that he “didn't press” then-HBO president Chris Albrecht on Gandolfini because he “thought Jimmy was embarrassed by his behavior.”
But Gandolfini's problems eventually reached the ears of Chris Albrecht, who invited him to his house with the idea of confronting him about going to rehab. Gandolfini, for his part, thought it was a normal evening: “It had become a huge problem,” Albrecht revealed to Miller, “and it had also become a lack of respect for the other actors, so “Some problems arose.” When Gandolfini arrived at Albrecht's house, he found a dozen people there, including David Chase and several members of his family. According to the manager, the television star's friends and family had rehearsed what to say to him that night, and they even had a private jet prepared to take him to rehabilitation: “But the entire intervention lasted 10 seconds. Gandolfini entered, saw the panorama, and immediately shouted: 'Come on, screw you. “Fuck you all,” recalled Albrecht, who also recalled that the actor looked at him defiantly and challenged him to fire him in front of everyone, and then left the place furious. “While the others stood stunned, one of his sisters chased him down the hallway, begging him to come back. But it does not work. Jimmy was not willing to accept any of that.”
In his book, Kamine makes it clear that, despite everything, Gandolfini was a beloved presence on the set. Every Friday night, the actor was in charge of buying sushi for the entire crew and every season finale he gave each crew member a gift, often worth hundreds of dollars. When he finished the series, he gave each of them a watch with an engraved inscription that read: “The Sopranos. 1997-2007. Rest in peace. Thank you. JG.”
Gandolfini died at the age of 51. He was in Rome with his second wife, Deborah Lin, his newborn daughter Liliane, and his eldest son, Michael, from his previous marriage to producer Marcy Wudarski. The entire family planned to go to the Taormina film festival, in Sicily. It was his son, who was 14 years old at the time, who found him in his hotel room.
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