Nobody ever pegged James Gandolfini for a leading man. Least of all James Gandolfini.
The actor, who died suddenly this week at age 51, thought of himself as a supporting player. And before he became Tony Soprano, that’s exactly what he was. He was a poker player in the 1992 revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange, and a dockworker in a short-lived stage production of “On the Waterfront.”
When he first read the script for “The Sopranos,” he couldn’t see himself in the leading role. “I thought they’d go with somebody else,” he told James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio.”
“You know, somebody suave, somebody better- looking.” Even after “The Sopranos” catapulted him to superstardom, he was unsure of his leading man status.
“To be honest, I’m not sure he ever believed he was even an actor,” says Matthew Warchus, who directed him in Broadway’s “God of Carnage.” “He seemed to be the only person completely blind to this magical talent he had.”
Gandolfini admitted to bouts, sometimes debilitating bouts, of self-doubt. I interviewed him after “Carnage” opened to rave reviews, and he confessed that he felt leagues behind his co-stars Hope Davis, Marcia
Gay Harden and Jeff Daniels.
“I don’t think he ever felt he was up to their level,” Warchus says. “He asked to be allowed to leave the show in rehearsal several times. He’d say, ‘You can find somebody a lot better than me.’ It wasn’t false modesty. It was real. He would do a speech and then say, ‘That was crap, let’s do it again’ . . . When an actor becomes a household name, they think they’ve been hired for their name value, not their talent. I kept telling him I hired him for his acting skills, but it took him a couple of weeks before he believed me.”
In the end, Gandolfini proved himself very much the equal of his co-stars. “God of Carnage” is about two couples whose children get into a fight at school. As the play unfolds, the four adults degenerate into children themselves — fighting, screaming, crying.
“I had to encourage him to open up and show real vulnerability,” Warchus says. “He said, ‘This is hell for me,’ but in the end he started to enjoy himself. He enjoyed the sporting side of it. And it did a lot for his self-esteem as an actor.”
Gandolfini received a Tony nomination, as did his co-stars. But his happiest moment came one night at dinner after the play, when someone passed his table and said, “Thanks, Mr. Gandolfini. We really loved you in the play tonight.”
Gandolfini took Warchus aside the next day and told him, “That was the first time in 10 years people didn’t say, ‘Hey, Tony!’ ”
“I think that told him that he had moved on as an actor,” says Warchus.
And yet there was certainly a touch of Tony Soprano in Gandolfini. When he came on “Theater Talk,” the show I co-host on PBS, he had one stipulation: Do not talk about “The Sopranos.” He was there to talk about “Carnage.” When the interview was over, we had to do some fake smiling and nodding for the cameras to use for editing later on. Harden and Davis happily smiled and laughed and nodded. But when one of our producers said, “OK, Mr. Gandolfini, I need you to smile and nod,” the actor just stared at him.
“You’re not going to ask me to do that, are you?”
“Yes, Mr. Gandolfini. We need you to smile and nod for us.”
“No f – – king way,” Gandolfini said. He stood up, ripped off his mike and stormed out of the studio.
There was silence.
A few seconds later he came back into the studio, walked over to the producer (who looked terrified), put his arms around him and said, “I’m sorry, man. There’s just no way I could do that.”
And then he gave him an orange.
Talk about a Tony Soprano moment!