James Gandolfini Challenged HBO Executives to Fire Him from ‘The Sopranos’ | Entertainment

Menacing mobster Tony Soprano was key to the success of The Sopranos — and James Gandolfini knew it.

The three-time Emmy winner as soon as wielded his essential position within the sequence by daring the community to fireplace him, former HBO CEO Chris Albrecht says. The heated second got here after the actor felt ambushed throughout an intervention meant to deal with his struggles with substance abuse.

“We did an intervention with him at my apartment in New York,” Albrecht recalled within the new Max docuseries Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos. “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.”

Attendees included Gandolfini’s sisters and a number of other of his castmates, mentioned Albrecht, so the star was fast to work out the scenario. “He walked in, and he saw everybody sitting there, and he went, ‘Aw, f— this.' And he walked out,” Albrecht mentioned. “Everybody went, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy!' And he turned to me and he went, ‘Fire me,' and he left.”

Gandolfini in the end caught with the present by way of its finish, main the mafia drama for six seasons from 1999 to 2007. Tony Soprano continues to be heralded as one of the crucial influential characters in TV historical past, and Gandolfini's efficiency was critically acclaimed on the time, incomes him three Emmy Awards, 5 Screen Actors Guild Awards, and one Golden Globe Award. 

Steven Van Zandt, who starred within the hit HBO drama as Silvio Dante, famous that the intervention was not the one event on which Gandolfini entertained the thought of leaving the sequence.

“He probably quit the show every other day. Maybe every day,” mentioned Van Zandt within the doc. “Every other day we would go to a bar and we would have the exact same conversation. We'd get drunk and [he'd] say, ‘I'm done. I can't, I'm not going back.' And I would say, ‘Okay, you got a hundred people depending on you here.' And he's like, ‘Ah, yeah, yeah, okay.'”

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Van Zandt added that whereas Gandolfini would normally be again to work the following day, he would additionally “disappear” for transient intervals of time, when the strain of main the sequence “got to him.”

His onscreen spouse Edie Falco mentioned, “He was incredibly invested in making that character believable, and unless you're really diligent you can end up taking your work home. And as an actor, that's not always a great idea.”

The Sopranos creator David Chase went as far as to liken Gandolfini to the character he so famously portrayed. “He was really a good guy and really complicated,” Chase mentioned in Wise Guy. “You might say, and I'm not sure about this, maybe there was more Tony there than he wanted to admit. That it was too easy for him.”

Gandolfini died of a coronary heart assault on June 19, 2013, on the age of 51. Last yr marked the tenth anniversary of his surprising loss of life, for which a number of of his costars shared heartfelt tributes.

“Forever grateful to have done so much work together, to have spent so much time in your company, and for all the generosity and kindness,” wrote Michael Imperioli. “Miss you lots, as do so many on the planet.”

Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is on the market to stream on Max, as are all six seasons of The Sopranos.