by Gill Pringle
Trailers for the film show the unmistakable young Gandolfini as a teenaged Tony, long before he would become a feared mobster.
If it seems like Michael Gandolfini, 22, would always assume the mantle of his late father, then the actor dissuades FilmInk of this notion, admitting how he actually auditioned several times for the role.
In fact, series creator David Chase and director Alan Taylor had already auditioned several other actors for the role. “We read a bunch of other actors, and I said, ‘We should really try Michael’,” recalls Chase. “And there was no doubt about it.”
For Michael’s part, he says, “I just wanted to do the best I could do, just to learn the craft of auditioning, but as the process continued over the next few months, I slowly began to fall in love with this new version of Tony and started to get ideas and it became clear to me that it was something that I really wanted to do and believed that I could do,” says the earnest young actor who was at his father’s side when he died unexpectedly at the age of 51 of a heart attack in Rome in 2013.
Through six celebrated seasons, David Chase’s groundbreaking HBO series, The Sopranos broke the mould and won innumerable awards for its fascinating depiction of an Italian-American crime family. At the show’s centre was James Gandolfini’s brilliant portrayal of Tony, the smart, brutal and yet depressed and sensitive mob boss, a true anti-hero. Infused with dark comedy, the series depicted a violent world of organised crime, infidelity and deception, Chase putting the show’s success down to one simple commonality. “Oddly enough, people related to it,” he says.
While The Sopranos’ domestic squabbles were familiar to viewers, the motivations of the show’s murderous protagonist were clearly articulated through Tony’s therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi. “I think Anthony Soprano had more of an interior life than had been depicted in other mafia stories,” adds Chase. “The guy was in psychotherapy, so you got to see what he was thinking and feeling.”
When the last episode of the series ended with an abrupt cut to black and the fate of Tony Soprano uncertain, fans were eager for more, despite Chase’s insistence that The Sopranos had reached its conclusion. The sudden death of Gandolfini in 2013 halted further conjecture that the series might continue from where it left off.
However, the process that would ultimately bring an earlier generation of The Sopranos and fellow gangsters the Moltisantis to the big screen began even before the series that inspired it, had wrapped production when Toby Emmerich, the then head of New Line Cinema, suggested the idea to Chase. “He was on me since before the show went off the air, and he kept at it. I always said I wasn’t going to do it, but I also said that I would never say, ‘Never’,” he recalls. “Eventually, I had this idea about the Newark riots and Junior and Johnny, and it just made sense.”
Fast forward to 2019 – two decades after the series’ debut – when production got underway on The Many Saints of Newark. Set in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the feature film ushers movie audiences even further back in time. “There are three or four stories in the film, but one of the most important became the story of young Tony and a guy he always considered his mentor, Dickie Moltisanti, and how Dickie exerted his influence, or didn’t, on Tony,” says Chase.
Michael Gandolfini was just 19 years old when he was asked to audition for his dad’s most famous role, Many Saints director and veteran Sopranos show-runner Alan Taylor saying that casting him was one of his easiest decisions as he set about recreating younger versions of many of the Sopranos characters.
“We knew it was going to be hard to find the guy who could both act and make you believe he would be the guy who grew into James Gandolfini. When Michael auditioned, it made us realise that he could do it. He’s completely got the vibe that was partly the character that David wrote, but so much the character that Gandolfini created,” says Taylor.
“It’s actually kind of eerie sometimes,” agrees Chase. “I noticed during the read-through, when he didn’t have a line, he had his arms on the table and was looking around. He started to do this thing with his shoulder, and I thought, ‘Holy shit, that’s Jim’. It was incredible.
“He really researched everything about The Sopranos. Everything about his dad, everything about Tony, he looked at it over and over again.”
While Gandolfini doesn’t enter The Many Saints of Newark until about midway – a younger actor portraying him as a boy – he assumes the reigns as Tony Soprano in the teenage years.
Even though Many Saints was shot on a brand-new set, Gandolfini couldn’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia, having grown up with his dad on the set. “I remember running around The Sopranos set and the cast and the crew and everybody being so nice to me.
“But I was sheltered from many of the scenes, so I didn’t really know what was going on. I remember the first time I saw my dad with his eye made up to look like a black eye, I thought it was so cool and it looked so real, and I would go to the make-up trailer and make them put a black eye on me – at five, six or seven years old. I just grew up with it, so I didn’t really know it was unusual,” says Gandolfini, who studied drama at New York University, making his screen debut three years earlier in Ocean’s 8.
Putting sentimentality aside, he soon got down to work. “Once I got to set, it was about being the best scene partner I could be for Alessandro and Jon. They were the actors that I was in my first scenes with,” he says referring to Jon Bernthal who plays Tony’s father Johnny Soprano, and Alessandro Nivola who plays young Johnny’s beloved mentor, Dickie Moltisanti.
Boasting a stellar ensemble cast including Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, Michela De Rossi and John Magaro, Vera Farmiga portrays Tony’s mother Livia Soprano, Leslie Odom Jr as rival mobster Harold McBrayer and Ray Liotta as Aldo “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti. Several other names will be familiar to Sopranos fans – the film featuring youthful versions of gangsters Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, Silvio Dante and “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, later to become seminal members of Tony’s crew.
Though he had practically grown up on the series’ set (with his own stash of toys, and even taking naps on The Sopranos bed), Gandolfini was too young to have watched the show at the time. “I’m roughly the age of the show. I was born while they were filming the first season. I’d come to set and see my dad film funny, goofy scenes. He’d never let me see scenes that were really violent. Tony Soprano to me was some chubby guy walking down a street, getting the paper.”
As he grew older, he became curious about his father’s fame, recalling, “My dad and I were driving, and I was like, ‘What’s The Sopranos about?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, it’s about this mob guy who goes into therapy’. But I was 11 then. The show was over.”
Once cast, Gandolfini delved into researching Tony Soprano and discovered the character’s many paradoxes. “Look at Tony Soprano – that guy’s the worst. He’s super mean; he kills people. He’s a serial cheater; he’s not a great dad. He’s a sociopath. And you say that to people, and they get offended. They’re, like, ‘He’s a great man! He’s loyal and loving’. I started to fall in love with the fact that he’s different. This is not the Tony that people saw. He’s sensitive. He’s curious. He’s very open to things that everyone else is closed off to.”
In common with many actors, James Gandolfini didn’t want his own son to act, worried about the precarious nature of a career in show business.
“I was so young when he said that,” says Michael. “So, I’d like to believe that if he knew my passion and my hard work and my love for it, that he, of course, would be proud of me. I just always was a creative kid. I liked making movies and watching movies and when it became time to sort of pick a college I wanted to go to and what I wanted to study, I always thought I would do something in filmmaking. But that’s when I took my first acting class and just fell in love with it and seven years later, I’m still doing it, so I guess I love it.”
Ultimately, he permitted himself to remove the pressure of playing his father. “I wasn’t playing my dad. I was playing Tony, so I didn’t feel the pressure of having to recreate my dad; I wanted to recreate Tony and by the time I’d gotten to the set , it was really about doing my job the best I could, like I would in any other career. I also wanted to make David and Alan proud. It was about doing a job.
“But it was absolutely terrifying on so many different levels. Let’s just start with the fact that this is a great character that’s loved by a lot of people. And that’s so awesome and you want to do it right. And then there’s the fact that it’s my dad, and I really want to do a good job for him,” he says.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t feel the pressure for the film to be a success. “Yeah, I do, and I think we all do. I’d think you’d be crazy not to feel some sort of responsibility,” he argues. “I always say that I’m anxiously excited. I’m very excited for everyone to see it. It’s been a long time coming but you just hope that you can do justice to the fans and to everyone who loved this series.
“I look back at the day I wrapped, and David looked at me and said: ‘You did your job’. And, while that may not seem very sentimental, that to me was the best compliment that I could get because that’s all I wanted to do as a young actor showing up to do my job. If it was a success in David’s eyes, then I’m proud of myself.”
The Many Saints of Newark is in cinemas November 4, 2021
