James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (3 page)

That scene is almost a movie in itself, a journey of character discovery with an astonishing denouement. But what stands out is Gandolfini’s thoughtful, almost playful attitude until the very end. The chilling way he clothes his anger in a slight smile, while not really hiding it at all. It’s a virtual audition for the part of Tony Soprano.

The psychological tension necessary to maintain that characterization over several days of technical shooting was extraordinary, for both actors. They had to hit a balletic rhythm, and stay in character after several peaks and valleys of emotional intensity. The pressure on a film set can be intense—visitors, time limits, scheduling conflicts, all contribute to a hectic, distracting environment. Gandolfini’s commitment to technique also demanded a complete immersion in the character to achieve his startling spontaneity.

That may be why, as Aston says, it became almost a standard part of the process for Gandolfini to try to quit every part he ever landed. And that’s why Aston was there—to bring him back to the character. She’d be on the set, then go over the next day’s script with him that night. And they could be long nights—union rules say an actor has to have twelve hours off after every full day, so starting times each succeeding day get pushed farther and farther back until you are filming in the wee hours. He had a bag of Meisnerian tricks—Gandolfini once told the press that if you need to do an angry scene, “don’t sleep” for two or three days, or walk around with something sharp in your shoe—but his real secret was preparation. And a vivid imagination.

Star actors are well paid for what they do, so we needn’t indulge in any false pity here. But many American method actors, especially men, begin to find trolling through such emotional depths increasingly difficult with time. A lot of entertainment doesn’t require it, of course. But that can only add to your frustration with the job. If there is this very difficult thing that you do very well, but it is taxing to do and there isn’t always a demand for it, you can develop a healthy contempt for the whole process. As Brando did, and Mitchum, too.

“It’s a hard head to get into sometimes,” Gandolfini told
GQ
. “I have a lot of fun at work too, don’t get me wrong. I love the people I work with. But there are some days when you get to work and you’re not angry enough, and you have to kind of get angrier and that’s a little … when I was younger, it was much more accessible.”

Maybe we can illustrate something about the Meisner technique, and method acting in general, with that always coyly self-referential production,
The Sopranos.
Toward the end of the series there’s an episode where Tony is recovering from being shot in the stomach by Uncle Junior. He’s worried about maintaining the respect of his crew in his weakened condition. He’s tried to compensate by hiring a driver/bodyguard whose obvious muscles—he drives around in a wife-beater and desert camo pants—is part of his job description. So Tony nerves himself up to sucker punch his bodyguard in front of the whole mob family, knocks the guy down, kicks him, and storms into the bathroom.

There we see Tony lean over the sink, breathing heavily, and then suddenly vomit into the toilet. He returns to the sink, stares haggardly at himself in the mirror, and then breaks into a barely perceptible smile. He’s let the mob get a glimpse of the monster again; he’s created the impression he wanted. And then he vomits once more.

For Tony, the scene is about keeping control with a clever stratagem: he’s intimidated the rest of the greedy sharks, and he’s glad he’s done it. But for Gandolfini, the scene is also a tribute to the Meisner technique. Giving us a glimpse of the monster is what actors do, too—as Gandolfini told the audience on
Inside the Actors Studio,
the best lesson he ever learned in acting school was that they don’t come to see “the guy next door.” Letting us glimpse the monster is what made him such a good actor—that sly little smile in the mirror recognizes that Jim’s done it again, and he’s proud of the effect.

But finding that monster, bringing him up and putting him on the screen in a way that seems entirely convincing, does not come without some psychic cost. That’s the second vomit—the price you pay. Meisner preached using your personal history, your own sadness and pain, the real core of your own feelings, to create a convincing reality on stage or screen. James Gandolfini could bring up the authentic monster. But doing that for years can make you a physical wreck.

“Violent roles?” Gandolfini said, in 2010. “Yeah. That’s all I got for a while. It’s okay. I’m an angry guy. I’m like a sponge. You wring yourself out and then you have none of that left in you for a while. It can be a good thing that way. I’ll do those parts again. It takes a toll though. Definitely takes a toll.”

*   *   *

Acting is a skill that some of us have and others don’t. And that skill can be improved with practice and discipline. But there’s no question that how you look, your physical type, shapes the roles you’re offered. When Gandolfini was auditioning for Tony Soprano, for example, he was sure the role would go to some “handsome George Clooney type, except Italian.”

The contrast between Gandolfini’s career and that of another Italian-American movie star who also happens to be from a roughly similar neighborhood in New Jersey—John Travolta—is interesting in this way (Travolta’s dad, who lived in Englewood, sold Gandolfini’s dad automobile tires). Travolta’s big break came on TV too, on the sitcom
Welcome Back, Kotter
in 1975, when he was barely out of his teens. He’s played handsome leading men all his life.

Gandolfini didn’t get his first sizable role, in
True Romance,
until he was thirty-two; he didn’t land his first lead role, as Tony, until he was almost thirty-nine (lucky for him the whole country, or at least its social conscience, seemed to be entering middle age at the same time). But it’s not a career path that predominates in entertainment. And, as he told
Inside the Actors Studio,
you’ve simply “got to work with what you got”—and it can be a blessing. “I wouldn’t have had the roles I’ve gotten if I looked like Peter Pan.”

Of course, most of the people who make their living in front of a camera
do
look a little like Peter Pan. Looks and hype are twin pillars in the architecture of celebrity culture. Beloved as he was, Gandolfini nonetheless stood out (though not alone, of course) in the lettuce-eating film community. A doctor who’d never treated him told the press after his death that he was “a heart attack waiting to happen.” There were tweets after his death was announced calling him “fatty,” followed by a backlash against the tweeters. The
New York Post
ran a cover story detailing his last meal in Rome: “Gandolfini guzzled four shots of rum, two piña coladas, and two beers at dinner with his son—while he chowed down on two orders of fried king prawns and a ‘large portion’ of foie gras, a hotel source in Rome said.”

One of Gandolfini’s first jobs in Manhattan was at an Upper East Side wine bar (“you could take home $100, $125 a night in tips there, and it helped if you knew your wine,” a friend who worked with him says). He worked in restaurants, clubs, and bars, like a lot of actors do, for years before he landed his first big part on stage. One of his best friends from his Rutgers days was chef Mario Batali, who started out cooking in a New Brunswick restaurant where Jim worked the bar. Later on, the actor would be a regular at Batali’s New York and L.A. restaurants, which specialize in Italian cuisine. The redheaded, portly Batali is also an expert in classical Italian cooking, and his ancestors go back more than a century in the West Coast Italian-American community.

Gandolfini didn’t just serve time in the food-and-drink industry. While still in his midtwenties he was hired to manage Private Eyes, a big, high-tech, high-priced nightclub on West Twenty-first Street in New York. He was good at his job, managing a “whole crew of bouncers,” buying liquor, running the help staff. And managing the public, too. There’s more than a little Manhattan bouncer in Tony Soprano and many of his film roles.

The caricature of the New Jersey good life—good food, drink, people, family—well, not everybody comes out of that looking like The Situation. New Jersey is often described as a “tribal” state, an archipelago of different ethnic cultures that persist even now. Among Italian-Americans who migrated westward along Bloomfield Avenue, away from Newark into the thinning ether of suburbia, the maintenance of the culture, and resistance to assimilation, is closely tied to family and food.
The Sopranos
devoted a whole episode to it.

That Gandolfini was part of that culture contributed to the authenticity he brought to the role of Tony. As an actor of surprising range, he could find an authenticity in all sorts of characters. After all, he’s played a New York City mayor (
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
), an American general (
In the Loop
), even the director of the CIA (albeit the first Italian-American one, Leon Panetta, in
Zero Dark Thirty
). But many of the people who knew him well describe Gandolfini’s life as a search for authenticity, both professionally and personally. That’s why he tried to quit so often, because he feared he could not summon it; that’s why his performances have such an unexpected impact when he brings it. The number of times he called “bullshit” on acting and Hollywood and publicity departments would almost fill a book itself. He was serious about what he did.

So there was no easy line on his life for the press. He had not constructed a pasteboard identity to go with the role of James Gandolfini that he tried to hawk the way so many young actors do.

Oh, he’d thought about it. One weekend when he was first starting to find his footing as an actor on the stage in New York, he went home for dinner with his parents and sisters, and asked them if they’d mind if he changed his name to “James Leather,” so that fans wouldn’t come knocking on the Gandolfini door.

“I said, ‘If I get famous, it could be a pain in the ass.’” They seemed to be mulling it over as he got up to go to the bathroom. When he came back, they were all laughing hysterically at the idea that Jimmy Gandolfini will become famous. “So that’s my family, you know?”

It’s a common contradiction, the contrast between who you are and who you’re playing. Gandolfini never completely lost that conflict, again like so many great method actors before him. It made him an acrobat in pain, always the best show under the tent. It also made him intensely private, reluctant to talk about himself, and so a bit of a mystery to his fans, who perhaps could be forgiven for calling him “Tony” when they met in person. Gandolfini as an actor seemed totally unguarded, but as a man, there were walls.

He made his name playing a series of thinking hitmen: Virgil in
True Romance;
Ben Pinkwater, a seemingly mild-mannered insurance salesman who turns out to be a psychotically violent Russian mobster, in
Terminal Velocity
; a gentle leg-breaker and bodyguard for gangsters in
Get Shorty
; a mob enforcer who turns on his partner, played by Alec Baldwin, in
The Juror
. And, of course, Tony Soprano. A little mystery probably helped the gregarious party animal get over in those roles. It certainly helped deliver the shock of Tony Soprano’s near reality TV presence for a decade.

Gandolfini became very good at hinting at depths of sadness and vulnerability that were left mostly to the imagination. When he won his third Emmy as a leading dramatic actor for
The Sopranos,
he gave a short, heartfelt acceptance speech that included a mention of Lynne Jacobson, whom viewers may have assumed was a college acting teacher, or an old friend who kept him in school, or something. It wasn’t until almost a year later, in an interview, that he acknowledged publicly that she had been his first love while they were both at Rutgers, and she’d died in a car accident when he was still a junior.

Jim always said he wanted to play people “like my mom and dad.” He complained about superhero movies, which have largely taken over Hollywood, helping to shift serious drama over to cable (a cultural reversal Gandolfini is often credited with achieving almost single-handedly). Movies were all so fake. Gandolfini wanted to be real.

So did
The Sopranos
. It was art imitates life imitates art: Bringing the American bromance of gangster movies to modern suburban life, where the church has lost credibility, the neighborhood is scattered, and family is attenuated to the point of transparency. Where did the real begin and the fake start? What
is
real anyway?

The series became a long tease about those questions. And at first the final episode’s fade to black seemed like an evasive answer. “When I first saw the ending, I said, ‘What the fuck?’” Gandolfini told
Vanity Fair
the year before he died. “I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that?”

Then he woke up the next morning.

“But after I had a day to sleep, I just sat there and said, ‘That’s perfect.’”

2.

Park Ridge Italians

When James Gandolfini was eleven years old, in 1972, Paramount released
The Godfather,
and the gap between the rich and the poor in America was the smallest it has ever been in its history.

The Godfather
was the capstone for a long series of hit gangster movies, beginning with Edward G. Robinson’s
Little Caesar
in 1931 and continuing, at regular intervals, through
The Sopranos.
For a long period
The Godfather
was the highest grossing film of all time. In a barbershop-mirror way, the world of
The Godfather
has replaced the reality of organized crime for many fans, and real gangsters now model themselves on its characters—on
The Sopranos,
we overhear thugs in tracksuits discussing the film’s finer points as if they were Roger Ebert.

Director Francis Ford Coppola hit upon the idea of turning the gangster into an analogue of the American capitalist, forced to adapt to survive, constantly changing with the times and the culture, and thereby slowly “losing the family.” It was a love letter to the stubborn ethnic cultures of the Northeast, which were being worn away by suburban mobility, rock ’n’ roll, and the general prosperity of the 1970s.