![]() He thought it was an off-the-books type of deal, just one professional group appreciating another. Nobody warned him that the cocktail reception after the awards show was a press event and that he’d be swarmed by reporters with notepads and tape recorders. In the summer of 1999, the Television Critics Association gave Gandolfini an award for his work on the show. Like, steal his soul, like in Angel Heart, and actually be Mickey Rourke!” He laughed and said, “No! I mean actually wanted to be Mickey Rourke. I said, “You wanted to be like Mickey Rourke?’ DeNiro, Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, they were all great, don’t get me wrong. If you were a young guy who loved movies and wanted to be an actor and was seeing a lot of movies in the eighties, there was nobody better than Mickey Rourke. He said, “In the eighties, Mickey Rourke was the shit. I vividly remember him talking about how much he loved Mickey Rourke. He talked about coming up in Hollywood and in the New York theater scene. We spent half a day together on the set of one of the Sopranos episodes. This is how James Gandolfini often greeted people: as if he was overjoyed to see them, and wanted to revel in their presence just in case he never saw them again. He hugged Mark and clapped him on the back so hard you’d think he was trying to dislodge food lodged in Mark’s gullet. His face lit up with one of the warmest smiles I’ve ever seen on anybody. When we arrived on the set, Gandolfini saw Mark. “I can’t wait to see the look on his face,” Mark said. The door struck Gandolfini in the forehead and left that famous crease. Apparently a bunch of guys were tear-assing around the dorm shooting dart guns at one another, and Mark surprised Gandolfini by kicking a door open before he could burst through it. My editor Mark DiIonno asked if he could come along when I visited the set, because he’d gone to Rutgers with Gandolfini and claimed to be personally responsible for the distinctive dent in the actor’s forehead. Somehow I managed to talk him into doing the interview anyhow. So I thought I should talk to you about it, and ask you if maybe there was some way we could not do this thing. Then he said, “I don’t want to get you in trouble with your bosses, though. Who cares what some actor has to say about anything? I’ll just come off sounding like an idiot.” “Why would anybody care? I’m just not that interesting. “I just don’t see how I’d have anything interesting to say,” he said. When I picked up the receiver, Gandolfini said, “Hey, listen, I’ve been thinking about it, and I really think it’s better if I don’t do this interview.” You know what? I think this is a conversation that you really should have with Matt. Then she held up a silencing finger because Gandolfini was already talking, nervously. She’d had a crush on him ever since she saw him play Geena Davis’ boyfriend in Angie. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “It’s James Gandolfini!” Two days before our scheduled interview, he called my house. I did one of the only one-on-one interviews with him, way back in late 1998, before The Sopranos premiered on HBO. Not too many people in the press were, I don’t think, except maybe people Gandolfini knew before he got famous. I wasn’t buddies with Gandolfini or anything. I kept in contact with members of the production staff after I handed the beat to my colleague Alan Sepinwall in 2004. I covered The Sopranos for the Star-Ledger, the paper Tony Soprano picks up at the end of his driveway. It was there in those sad eyes and that radiant smile. You could sense the goodness in him, no matter how tortured and tormented his characters were. ![]() Gandolfini’s goodness was, I believe, at the heart of the powerful connection he forged with viewers. I got to know him a bit as a reporter, and I can testify that what you’ve heard is true. In the wake of James Gandolfini’s death – of a heart attack, at the appallingly young age of 51 – I keep coming back to that realness, and the source of it, his goodness. Why are you interested in me? You don’t ask a truck driver about his job.” You watched him act and you thought, “Yes. ![]() Everyone who watched him perform, in a starring role or a bit part, came away feeling understood. James Gandolfini had an authentic connection with viewers. People who never met him in person and knew him only through his performance on The Sopranos felt it. People who talked to him for five minutes and never saw him again felt it. ![]()
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