“He turned to me and he went, ‘Fire me'”
James Gandolfini almost walked out on The Sopranos following a failed drugs intervention, according to those behind the show.
The actor, who passed away in 2013, famously played the role of mobster Tony Soprano across the show’s six seasons between 1999 and 2007.
Speaking in new documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos, HBO CEO Chris Albrecht recalled the actor’s struggles with substance abuse during production.
“We did an intervention with him at my apartment in New York,” he said. “That was to try to get him to go to a facility for rehab. We’d had a lot of friction by that point, and the ruse was that I was inviting Jimmy over so we could talk things through and kind of clear the air.”
“He walked in, and he saw everybody sitting there, and he went, ‘Aw, fuck this.’ And he walked out,” Albrecht added. “Everybody went, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy!’ And he turned to me and he went, ‘Fire me,’ and he left.”
Fellow star Steven Van Zandt, who played Silvio Dante, admitted that Gandolfini “probably quit the show every other day. Maybe every day”.
“Every other day we would go to a bar and we would have the exact same conversation,” he recalled. “We’d get drunk and [he’d] say, ‘I’m done. I can’t, I’m not going back.’ And I would say, ‘OK, you got 100 people depending on you here.’ And he’s like, ‘Ah, yeah, yeah, OK.’”
He also revealed that Gandolfini would “disappear” for small periods of time, notably when the pressure of leading the show “got to him”.
Back in June, the cast of The Sopranos reunited at the Tribeca Film Festival to mark the show’s 25th anniversary as well as the premiere of the documentary.
Meanwhile, Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn Sigler – who played Tony Soprano’s daughter Meadow on the series – recently revealed that Gandolfini quietly donated to MS charities in her name after she was diagnosed with the disease in 2002.
“I found out after his death that he donated to MS organizations constantly for me,” she told the Life Is Short podcast.
Recalling Gandolfini being the first person she told about her diagnosis, she added: “He pulled me aside one day and he said, ‘Jamie, what is going on?’ I just fell in a puddle in his arms. And I was just like, ‘I’m so scared, but I have MS, and I don’t know how to tell anybody.’ And he’s like, ‘Your secret’s safe with me.’”
