James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (11 page)

Neptune’s Net is a seafood place popular with bikers and surfers just across the county line in Ventura. It’s been a neighborhood landmark for more than a generation. That stretch of the coast highway going north is sort of like the Jersey Shore, but bigger—the straight, flat beach stretching out almost as far as the eye can see in either direction, and in front of you the bright boundless Pacific Ocean, where every night the sun sets in an orgy of golds and purples. It’s a very nice place to live, especially in a beachfront condo provided by your production company.

“While we were living there, Jim’s parents came out to visit for about a week,” Loftin recalled. Jim’s two older sisters were already well on their ways to responsible jobs, Johanna with the court system in Jersey and Leta as a corporate executive in the garment trade. “One day we were waiting for dinner to cook—I think a game was on TV—so his mom went out to sit in a chair on the deck in the afternoon sun for a few minutes. She looked so happy and peaceful—and almost relieved—like she was able to absorb it all, and she knew that her boy was doing the right thing with his life and that he was going to be okay. I pointed her out to Jim. He got it.”

Crimson Tide
opened to positive reviews, and it made money, but the story of conflict between submariners of different generations seemed a bit tired. Still, it was a major role with major stars. Gandolfini bought his first home ever in 1996, a nice apartment in the West Village, but his acting career seemed to slow. He released just one film that year,
The Juror—
it was shot in New York City—starring fellow
Streetcar
veteran Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore.

It’s in
The Juror
that we begin to see what you might call the Gandolfini Effect: his performance is so good that it comes close to capsizing the movie. Eddie is a hitman, working with rogue Mafia enforcer Alec Baldwin, but he clearly wants to do it with a minimum of angst. Scare the civilian, sure, but keep it within reason—the victim’s cooperation in getting the boss off the hook at his trial is Eddie’s real focus.

Baldwin’s character seems to enjoy terrorizing Moore for its own sake, and somehow to be lost about whom he really is. But Eddie is a normalizing force. His meeting with Moore in a Brooklyn grocery store, where he confesses he’s got a kid himself—as if that absolves him of the horror the mob is putting her through—is fascinating. It’s just my job, ma’am, nothing personal; please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times during the ride and you’ll be fine.

It’s not true, of course. Nothing the victim does will make her fine. But you get the sense that Eddie really
wants
it to be true.

And critics seemed to notice. Roger Ebert said
The Juror
would have been a much better movie if the entire script had been pitched at the level of Gandolfini’s performance.

Then, in early January 1997, Santa Gandolfini died.

Several years later,
The National Enquirer
managed to browbeat Gandolfini into discussing on the record his struggles with cocaine and alcohol in the late nineties. On September 26, 1997, about eight months after his mother died, he was arrested for DUI in Los Angeles. “I was racing someone and I was over the limit,” he said, joking that “it was the best French toast I ever had when they woke me up in the Beverly Hills jail.”

It was an era when Hollywood stars, particularly male stars, seemed to generate stories about drug abuse and wild behavior as if they were on contract to do so. The problems of Robert Downey, Jr., and
True Romance
costar Tom Sizemore were recurrent tabloid fodder. People who worked with Gandolfini later in his career, when he seemed to have control of his drinking and drug abuse, often casually assumed his problems were similar.

But there’s actually very little on the record to confirm that assumption. Gandolfini’s bad behavior seemed much more episodic than that, like the mood swings friends noticed in college. And he often seemed deeply repentant when it was over, and moved to surprising generosity to anyone he might have offended or inconvenienced. It’s not even certain by any means that these occasional breakouts into substance abuse were the cause of Jim’s friends’ extraordinary protectiveness.

However much of a problem it was, it didn’t interfere with getting back to work. He was a corrupt cop in Sidney Lumet’s
Night Falls in Manhattan
(1997)
,
a beguiling rapist in
She’s So Lovely
(same year, made from an old script by John Cassavetes and directed by his son, Nick, with Sean Penn and John Travolta), and good cop possessed by the demon Azazel in
Fallen
(1998). All of them were both magnetically dangerous and oddly sympathetic.

He was still alternating these roles with attempts at expanding his character actor credits, too. In 1997, in the “Columbus Day” pilot episode of Robert Altman’s six-part TV series
Gun,
Gandolfini was another solid, ethnic working guy (who boasts that “Everything that looks good or tastes good was invented by Italians”). His wife, played by Rosanna Arquette, is secretly cheating on him, and the plot is cleverly fashioned so that Jim shoots her lover without ever finding out about the affair—he’s a nice guy
and
a killer, and a bit of an innocent dupe. Later that year he played a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who keeps getting hit by passing vehicles but is never hurt, kind of like Wile E. Coyote, in
Perdita Durango
.
Durango
was a Spanish production directed by Álex de la lglesia, a sort of horror-crime movie starring Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem. It was one of Jim’s first completely comic roles, though it was embedded in a kind of bloody occult-revenge flick.

The film he seemed to care about the most from this period was
A Civil Action
(1998)
,
starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall. Shot in Boston, the movie was based on a real incident of chemical contamination in Woburn, Massachusetts, that established corporate responsibility for poisoning public water supplies. Gandolfini’s part was modest but crucial—he plays Al, the first employee of the waste disposal companies working for W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods to come forward with evidence of improper dumping of carcinogens in the town’s watershed. Literally a working-class hero.

Gandolfini may have been thinking about this film when, years later, on
Inside the Actors Studio,
he answered a question about what alternative profession he might have liked to pursue if he hadn’t become an actor: “Environmental lawyer.”

Still, it was the heavies the movies wanted him to do, the desperate monsters you hoped could be saved but really were already lost. In the melodrama about disabled children
The Mighty
(1998) he played “Killer” Kane, the abusive father of one of the protagonists, and in
8MM
(1999) he was a talent scout for snuff films who is murdered by Nicholas Cage (both characters are thoroughly reprehensible).

Oscar Wilde, who knew something about acting and the theater, once said that neither the state of sin nor that of innocence interested him so much as the moment he passed from one to the other. Gandolfini’s gift as an actor is to show us how to dance along the line between good and evil, only to suddenly drive across in a blur of immediacy. Just as he did in Gately’s class when he “destroyed all that crap they have on stage.” Until that moment, he makes us root for him to control himself, not just because it’s scary to see such a big guy lose it, but because he makes you feel how much
he
really wants to keep it together himself.

It pulls your sympathy, but it also makes the viewer complicit with his character, giving even his mundane bad guys an odd resonance.

And it was the résumé that he brought with him to what would become his greatest creation as an actor.

6.

The Sopranos
Begins (1999)

When the first episode of
The Sopranos
aired on January 10, 1999, nobody could possibly have foretold what the show would become—a monster hit, driving audiences for serious drama away from movies to cable television (of all places), and the first TV series to earn over a billion dollars in syndication, DVD sales, video game profits, etc. Critical raves rolled in.

That kind of thing made James Gandolfini very nervous.

Susan Aston says Jim “tried to quit every role he ever got.” It was indeed almost a tic he had. Even for his work on
The Sopranos.
He stopped in the middle of his audition with David Chase and begged to be allowed to come back and do it again—he said he had an illness in his family, and he just wasn’t hitting it right. He didn’t even show up for the second audition. Gandolfini apologized and asked if he could come by Chase’s house and audition there. Surprised, Chase agreed, and Gandolfini came over and auditioned in his garage later that night. He finished the whole scene in one go.

“What happens every time [when you’re casting something] is that people come in and read, and they read and they read, and you start to think, This is really badly written, the thing sucks,” is how Chase remembered Gandolfini’s final audition to
Vanity Fair
’s Peter Biskind. “And then the right person comes in, and it all works. It was pretty obvious that Jim had too much going on for this role to go with anyone else.”

But Gandolfini didn’t see it that way. “I read it. I liked it. I thought it was good,” James said afterward. “But I thought they would have to hire some good-looking guy, not
George Clooney,
but some Italian George Clooney, and that would be that.”

Gandolfini’s manager and friend Mark Armstrong, who has worked with the agency handling Jim’s career since
Angie
in 1994, said it got to be like clockwork. “About a week before a production was supposed to start filming, we’d get a letter, copied to the director, in which Jim would give everybody an out, asking them if they were sure they thought he could do the part. And he’d always include the names of three actors he thought were available who could do a better job.”

In an industry as ego-driven as show business, Gandolfini’s behavior was, to put it mildly, unusual. You might think it was just a way to ward off the evil eye, you know, to placate Nemesis for a lucky break you might not deserve. But James really seemed to mean it. Everyone who knew him smiles about his absolute modesty. He almost never watched himself perform in daily rushes (he hated looking at them). He had a hard time seeing in his performances what other people saw; he noticed mostly the flaws. And that didn’t change as he got more famous as an actor.

It’s particularly difficult for us to sympathize with Gandolfini about his talent because it’s so hard to imagine any other actor making a better Tony Soprano. Starting with that iconic first episode—Tony wading into his swimming pool in his bearish white terrycloth bathrobe to commune with the wild ducks—he just seemed perfectly suited to the role, physically and emotionally.

“The thing about actors is, when they’re really great, they have no idea when they do great work,” says Harold Guskin, who helped coach Gandolfini for most of his film roles.

“The Great Guskin,” as John Lahr called him in
The New Yorker,
has been coaching actors for some twenty-five years, starting with Kevin Kline, who met Guskin in the 1970s when they were both musicians at Indiana University in Bloomington. Guskin’s approach isn’t method, but more personal; the idea is to help actors “stop acting” and deliver immediate emotions as if they were immersed in real life. His 2005 book,
How to Stop Acting,
includes quotes from clients like Kline, Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, and, of course, James Gandolfini.

“Acting has to come from the gut,” says Guskin, slapping his still-flat middle. “You don’t act with your head. You have to deliver your lines as if they are spoken in real time, in real life. Immediacy is the object. So an actor who is doing really great work
should
have no idea how well he’s doing. It’s over too quick for him to know.

“And then after acting comes the questioning of everything you did,” he continues. “The second thoughts, the self-doubt. It’s horrible. Being an actor is very difficult. The pressure … can be tremendous.”

Many actors have self-esteem issues long before they go on stage; in fact, that’s why some are there in the first place, to get unqualified approval from an abstract group of people who don’t really know them. Still, even for the best, how they do what they do can be a psychological puzzle. “Some actors are embarrassed by acting,” says Nicole Holofcener, who directed Gandolfini in his last feature film, the realistic romantic comedy
Enough Said.
“Just opening their mouths and talking is an embarrassment, and it takes a lot of courage to go on and get through a scene.”

Stage actors get an immediate reaction from the crowd, but TV and film acting is mysterious until long after it’s been performed, recorded, and edited. So the place of the audience is taken by the director and the crew.

And the crew, as many theater people say, is an idealized family. “It’s like a family that you know is going to go through a divorce in three months,” Susan Aston says, “except, in the case of
The Sopranos,
the family lasted ten years.”

On a lot of TV shows, the star is the head of the “family.” In most, the principal actor is much more than just an actor—it’s not exactly being the producer, or the director, or the owner of the network, but it’s not just reading lines, either. While they were shooting the first season, Gandolfini told one of his closest associates that “it didn’t feel right, that he wasn’t really a lead actor, that he saw himself differently than that.” It was, after all, his first lead since
Tarantulas Dancing.
And yet he went around meeting the other actors and the crew, shaking hands, asking if he could help them in any way, just like a veteran lead.