‘The Sopranos’ fined James Gandolfini $250k a day for missing filming: “Fuck it. I can’t come in to work”
According to a new biography, James Gandolfini was fined $250,000 for each day he missed filming on The Sopranos, to which he replied: “Fuck it, I can’t come in to work”.
The actor played mob boss Tony Soprano on all six seasons of the celebrated HBO drama from 1999 to 2007. He would also appear in films such as In The Loop and Zero Dark Thirty. Galdolfini died in 2013 of a heart attack, aged 51.
Regarded as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, he won three Emmys and a Golden Globe for his work, and became one of the best-known actors in television. According to the new biography Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend by Jason Bailey, the fame took its toll on the actor, who dealt with the pressure by partying and missing work.
In a excerpt published by Vanity Fair, cast and crew members on the show recalled the issues around his absences:
“The no-shows started during season 3. The stress of The Sopranos had weighed on James Gandolfini from the beginning; his costar Steven Van Zandt recalls spending ‘most of my time talking him into coming back the next day. . . . We’d have the same conversation at least once a month’”.
“Van Zandt would reaffirm how lucky they were to be on such an excellent show, how few comparable film roles there were out there, and then he’d deliver the clincher. ‘Come back and do us all a favour, because you’re helping to employ, I don’t know, 60 people here?’ he’d remind him”.
The passage then goes into why the actor would miss filming:
“The reasons for Gandolfini’s ‘days off’ varied. Sometimes he was avoiding a difficult or embarrassing scene. Sometimes the difficulties of line memorisation would send him into a tailspin”.
“Sometimes he wanted to get an early start on a weekend of partying, which was increasingly his coping mechanism for his unhappiness at home; sometimes he hadn’t quite recovered from one of those weekends. ‘He likes to have a good time,’ explains Sopranos script supervisor Christine Gee, ‘but sometimes, you know . . . some people don’t know when to stop’”.
The show’s cinematographer, Phil Abraham, discussed how HBO tried to handle his behaviour, as well as the star’s candid reaction.
“’I can’t say I’ve ever been on a show where something like that has gone on, but this was
sort of a different beast,’ Abraham says. ‘At a certain point, HBO was fining him 250 grand a day. And he would say, Fuck it. I can’t come in to work. So we knew then, it’s not just him doing a lot of blow and drinking, and he’s not getting up because he doesn’t want to get up. No, it was deeper than that’”.
Recently, Gandolfini’s co-star Lorraine Bracco criticised her character Dr Melfi’s “abrupt” ending in The Sopranos.
The post ‘The Sopranos’ fined James Gandolfini $250k a day for missing filming: “Fuck it. I can’t come in to work” appeared first on NME.
Victoria Luxford
NME
