1. He pulls up on his Harley. I watch as he awkwardly backs the small bike to the curb outside the Ear Inn and lifts off his helmet. James Gandolfini arrived back in New York City at seven thirty this evening after his Emmy weekend in Los Angeles; he put his 5-year-old son to bed, then headed out, only slightly late for his interview. He does very few of these. He has not always had an easy time with the public side of the fame _The Sopranos _has brought him—all those nosy questions, those pesky paparazzi, the peculiar moments when a person will come up to you as you are vomiting at the curbside outside a Tennessee airport to ask whether you'd mind his taking a picture. But nor does he have much patience with the sound of someone like him complaining about such things. In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He's feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.
He chose to ride the Harley because he wasn't going far. He also has a scooter he uses to get through the traffic when heading farther uptown. "I catch a lot of grief because of the scooter," he explains as he takes his seat in the back corner of the cramped restaurant. "A friend told me I look like Shrek...this huge thing on this little thing."
2. James Gandolfini is currently enjoying his longest break from playing Tony Soprano since he first began wearing the shoes of the most mesmerizing character on modern TV. If Gandolfini fully realized what he has achieved as Tony Soprano, then he wouldn't be quite the man he seems to be. Over five seasons, with great grace and even greater exquisite clumsiness, he has allowed us to see a little of what we should be, a lot of what we shouldn't be, and much too much of what we are—all this without seeming to be showing us anything at all. We can celebrate this grand achievement only a little while longer. The sixth and supposedly final season doesn't begin shooting until April. "Some days you wish you could just kind of get it over with," he says. "Just get in there and get it done."
I ask Gandolfini whether this is definitely the last season.
"I believe so," he says, and immediately adds,"I hope so." Then, just as quickly, he retreats. "I shouldn't put it that distinctly. But I'm ready to go, I think. I've done this now from probably the age of 34 to 43. And that's enough."
I ask him what it is he has had enough of.
"I think some of his flaws are my flaws," he says of Tony. "And so you try to get away from them, and then you kind of get pulled in a little bit by playing them." A man like James Gandolfini is hardly likely to list the particular flaws he refers to, but it is fairly clear he is not alluding to an unshakable itch to commit murder or a fondness for extortion. It may be wiser to look at some of Tony Soprano's more universal character traits and predicaments, to some part of the cocktail of fury and indulgence and love and lust and depression that taunts many of us. "It's a hard head to get into sometimes. I have a lot of fun at work, too, don't get me wrong. I love the people I work with. But there are some days when you get to work and you're not angry enough, and you have to kind of get angrier, and that's a little..." He trails off. "When I was younger, it was"—he explains, grinning— "much more accessible."
If there is a new calmness about him, he largely credits it to one thing: "My son," he says. "And realizing that going around swearing and acting like an idiot is not good for anyone involved. As you get older, you realize that all that wind signifying nothing is silly sometimes." He describes the "wonderful summer" he spent at the Jersey Shore with his son. "We spent a lot of time on the beach doing nothing," he says. "We dig holes and get our feet wet."
To me, he recommends the burgers but then tells the waitress he wants whatever grilled fish the couple at the next table are eating. These, too, are small concessions to this time in his life—he tries to do a little less drinking these days and to eat a little bit better. "I ran my body pretty hard for a long time," he says, "and I'm wondering if all of a sudden I'm going to get nailed in the next couple of years, so I want to take care of myself a wee bit better."
When I ask him something moronic about this newfound preference for grilled fish, he erupts with polite exasperation, the way he will whenever anything seems too personal or embarrassing or disrespectful or trivial. "Oh, who gives a fuck about any of this?" he asks cheerfully, but in a way—his eyes fixing on you, then darting about as the muscles around his mouth move through a repertoire of expressions—that unavoidably reminds you of Tony Soprano. "Seriously?"
···
**3. **I had expected there might be awkward moments in our conversation, so I employ the occasional piece of preplanned strategy.
Early in our conversation, I throw out a question. At best it's a gentle invitation to talk.
"What's a typical day like?" Gandolfini gently rolls his eyes. "There is no typical day, and it's boring anyway. Next."
I point out that this wasn't actually a question of my own. It is taken from an Interview magazine article about his Sopranos costar Lorraine Bracco—an interview conducted by James Gandolfini.
He shakes his head, slightly amused. "I think I was actually very hungover and I was like, 'What do I ask you? I have no idea.' " He nods. "That was a bad question. Glad you threw it back at me."
···
4. James Gandolfini's first high-profile interview long preceded any of the recent events that have made him famous. It was for a May 1988 New York Times article about itinerant Manhattan youths,"The Apartment Gypsies of Manhattan":
Then there is Jim Gandolfini, who seems to thrive on the apartment-hopping life. Since moving to New York City four years ago, Mr. Gandolfini, 26 years old, has never had his name on a lease, never paid more than $400 a month in rent and never lived in one place more than 10 months. His wanderer's existence has given him sojourns, some as brief as two months, in Hoboken, N.J.; Astoria, Queens; Clinton and the Upper West Side of Manhattan; and Park Slope and Flatbush in Brooklyn.
_"Moving, to me, is no big deal," said Mr. Gandolfini, whose calling is the theater but whose living comes mostly from bartending and construction. "I have a system down. I throw everything in plastic garbage bags and can be situated in my new place in minutes. Without my name on a lease, I'm in and out. I have no responsibilities." _
He still lives alone in the city, but with firmer roots. "I'd have to move a lot of crap," he says.
···
5. Recently, James Gandolfini was inducted into the Hall of Distinguished Alumni at Rutgers University. He went with his old friend, the chef Mario Batali, with whom he'd get drunk and make pasta in their college days. "So the two of us were inducted after a microbiologist, someone who invented the patch for nicotine...ten of these people, and then it was us, so I was like, 'Well, here's Heckle and Jeckle at the end.' It was nice, you know. I said, 'To be honest, I haven't a clue how I graduated from here, but thank you—I met a lot of intelligent people that are still my friends, and I had a ball.' "
After college Gandolfini headed for New York, where he answered an ad and was made manager of a nightclub, Private Eyes. He was 21. "All kinds, straight, gay," he remembers. "It was the first nightclub that had videos. The Cars. Duran Duran. I was way too young, but I tried to act like I knew what I was doing, and I had no fucking clue." The first weekend, he ordered enough beer for six months, but after a while he found his feet and stayed for a few years.
The world of the night was one he readily embraced."I got drunk, I got laid, I had fun," he says."I saw a lot of stuff and didn't have to wake up at six thirty in the morning."
In the years after that, he did whatever he needed to—some bartending, some bouncing, some delivery work, some landscaping, some furniture moving. He sold books on the Manhattan streets.
He'd taken the odd acting class over the years, but he was in his midtwenties before he found a good class and stuck with it. Acting was something he just felt drawn to. His first paid acting job was touring Scandinavia in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Then he appeared in a New York play as a man deprogramming women obsessed with Elvis Presley. His big break was again in A Streetcar Named Desire, this time on Broadway, playing Steve.
One evening early in his career, just as he was having his first small successes in the theater, he was sitting at the family dinner table with his parents and sisters. He floated the subject of whether it would be prudent for him to change his name for their sake. "I said, 'If I get famous, it could be a pain in the ass, ' " he remembers. "'If I make it in any way as an actor, people will know, and if I do something stupid, people will know.'" (He hadn't given much thought to what he would use as a replacement for Gandolfini. "James—I don't know what," he says. "Leather?" James Leather? "I don't know. I knew someone called that once— Charles Leather.")
His family appeared to be listening seriously and considering his suggestion. "And," he says,"I got up to go to the bathroom, and apparently my sisters and my mother and my father were laughing hysterically about what a jerk-off I was to think that I was actually going to ever succeed at all." He shrugs. "So that's my family, you know?"
I ask him whether this ever gets mentioned now in family discussions.
"Yeah, occasionally," he says. "My sisters are now slightly humbled by it. Good."
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6. Though James Gandolfini appeared just away from the center of attention in many movies before The Sopranos took off, it is perhaps a compliment to his acting abilities if you don't recall his roles in True Romance, Crimson Tide, 8MM, Get Shorty, and Night Falls on Manhattan. He has even filmed a few movies during the show's run—The Mexican, The Last Castle, The Man Who Wasn't There, this fall's Surviving Christmas, the forthcoming Romance and Cigarettes—though he may feel the need to shake off Tony Soprano before he can truly show what else he can do.
I ask him: Why do you think you act?
"To maybe vomit my emotions out of me," he says, an answer both flip and serious. He smiles. "Am I making this hard for you?" he asks. And he offers a more considered reply: "I think I feel a lot. I never wanted to do business or anything. People interest me, and the way things affect them. And I also have a big healthy affinity for the middle class and the blue-collar, and I don't like the way they're treated, and I don't like the way the government is treating them now. I have a good healthy dose of anger about all of that. And I think that if I kept it in, it wouldn't have been very good. I would have been fired a lot. So I found this silly way of living that allows me to occasionally stand up for them a little bit. And mostly make some good money and act like a silly fool."
Gandolfini—who will vote for John Kerry in November—offers examples: health care, the removal of sports from many Oregon schools, corporate tax avoidance. "The money that goes to these islands offshore!" he exclaims. "I paid more tas than Enron one year—what the fuck is that about?"
He doesn't find too many of the stories he would like to be part of coming his way. "There's a lot of things that don't have anything to say," he says. "Just stories about nothing, that don't signify anything. A lot of things. Too violent."
I point out that some people would be surprised he would turn down movies for being too violent, given that they may have seen few things more violent than some of what they've seen on The Sopranos.
"But it's violence with a consequence," he replies." There's violence and violence. You know, some people complain that the rape of Jennifer Melfi was so violent and horrifying...Well, it's a rape. I think by definition it's violent and horrifying. If you're going to portray it, portray it. We certainly don't glorify the violence, and we show them suffering. I don't think these people are having a ball, if you really watch the show. They're not the happiest people on earth. The characters, there's a lot of pain that comes from different ways in it. It's hard to win with that battle, because if you're too violent, people say you're too violent, and if you're not violent, people say you're making them into cuddly teddy bears. But I think the violence there is justified. I think occasionally it's been a little ridiculous. Not too often. Ninety-nine percent of the time it's justified, and there's consequences."
But occasionally it does make even you uncomfortable?
"Oh yeah. It makes me feel uncomfortable. But it doesn't mean it's wrong."
7. James Gandolfini says that when he was recently approached to play Ernest Hemingway, he was taken aback. Though he studied literature at Rutgers, he's not sure any Hemingway came his way: "I couldn't remember a fucking thing I read. I probably somehow skipped them and did the test... I'm much more of a life- experience kind of person." But then he sampled a few short stories and was blown away. "I think I can play someone like that," he says. "I think he did all that stuff in his life for a reason—some of the reason I think was he was in pain a lot of the time, and he needed to keep moving."
Mostly, Gandolfini reads mystery books, particularly to go to sleep. "I should be reading better stuff than I do," he says. He mentions James Lee Burke and Stephen Hunter, whose book Dirty White Boys he's read twice. "To me, maybe because my work is all about feelings and emotions and things like that, to read a book about that is a little much sometimes at night. I just want to read plot, mostly."
He asks me whether I have heard Green Day's new album yet and talks about the enduring appeal of Lynyrd Skynyrd. "Call Me the Breeze," that's his favorite. "And there's one song, a very funny song, kind of like—" he says, and tries to paraphrase the lyric: "'When I'm out on the road and I come home, don't ask me about my business, leave me alone.' Very funny shit. I don't remember the name of it."
As it happens, I believe he really doesn't remember the song's title, but maybe he prefers not to reflect on the absurdly Freudian fact that this minor southern-rock anthem about the need to be left alone when you come home from touring (Well, "What's your favorite color and do you dig the brothers?" is drivin' me up a wall), the one James Gandolfini has been enthusing about in one of his rare interviews, is called "Don't Ask Me No Questions."
8. It is through both his patience and impatience with questions in which he sees little purpose that James Gandolfini allows some insight into himself.
What do you think people misunderstand about you?
"Nothing. I don't think they think about me that much. I don't think it's a topic of anyone's conversation." He pauses to laugh at what he clearly sees as an absurd notion. "It doesn't make a bit of fucking difference."
Yeah, but I think what you're saying is that you don't really want people to think about you too much.
"No," he says firmly. "I'm not saying that. I'm saying that I do my job. When I'm playing Tony Soprano, they think I'm like that, and when I'm playing someone else, they should think that character's like that. It's not me."
It must be weird and maybe a bit uncomfortable when people project onto you parts of Tony Soprano's personality.
"You have to understand it, that's all. It's no big deal. When people want to ask you to dinner sometimes and they don't know you, they want Tony Soprano to come to dinner. They don't want Jim Gandolfini to come to dinner. I would bore the fucking tits off them."
No, you seem very good dinner company.
He smiles. "Why, thank you, sweetie."
9. James Gandolfini grew up in Park Ridge, New Jersey, in a family where his parents spoke Italian in the house. (His mother was born in Italy; his father was born in America but returned to Italy as a 2- year-old.) His father would put the speakers out on the lawn and listen to Italian singers as he cut the grass.
What's the most Italian thing about you?
"Loyalty to friends and family, I think. I guess you'd have to ask them. Stubbornness. I don't know. I think I'm very Italian. I communicate a little bit through yelling. A lot of our family does that. I've been working on that."
In which ways are you most like your father? "I yell when I can't put shit together. When you've got to screw little fucking screws into little things, like putting a table together. I start screaming, 'This fucking crap...this shit...fucking Japanese shit...' Like that."
Can't you get people to do that stuff for you these days?
"I don't do it that much anymore, I got to admit. Only when I put together something for my kid or something. But no, I used to have to put Ikea furniture together when we were first married and had the baby. All that Ikea shit. I used to swear and yell. So occasionally I'll have that Italian fucking fit. Which is funny. I mean, I've had some good laughs at my father's fits. But then, some ain't so funny."
In what ways are you most like your mother?
"I don't know—introspective, depressed, a little judgmental, kind of smart about people."
When you were growing up, do you think you thought you'd do something to be noticed?
"No, not really noticed. I knew I'd do something a little different. I knew I wouldn't be able to—well, that's not really true. I went to college, and then this girl I knew died. Let's not make a big deal out of that."
He says this so suddenly, and it is so unexpected, that I ask him to repeat it.
"The girl I knew died in a car accident, and I—that changed me a lot," he says quietly. "Before that I don't know what I would have done."
He was 19. Her name was Lynn Jacobson. He had been going out with her for two years. He was still a junior, but she had graduated. He wasn't in the car. "She was a smart, lovely girl who worked two jobs to get her way through college and to help her family," he says. "It didn't make much sense. It made me very angry."
After that, things seemed different to him. "I think it changed me a little bit," he says. "I think I was studying advertising or something before that, and after that I changed a little bit. You know, it must have changed me a little bit."
Do you think maybe that you might not have done what you've done if that hadn't happened?
"Yeah, I think I might not have done what I've done. I don't know what I'd have done. I think it definitely pushed me in this direction. I don't know why. Just as a way to get out some of those feelings. I don't know."
Was there any of that "Life isn't to be wasted..."?
"No. If anything, it was 'Why plan for the future? Fuck it.' It was like 'Fuck this.'"
When he won his Emmy last year, he acknowledged Jacobson from the stage but didn't explain further. He figures that maybe it is time, out of respect.
"In a way, I'm only realizing now how much it affected me," he says. "I think I'm calming down now from the anger and being able to look back at it. It still affects me.... But I don't want this to come across as 'poor me' or anything," he adds. "The tragedy of it is her—what a lovely, lovely person she was—not how it affected me. I just need to say that."
10. Two more questions: How are you enjoying your enduring status as a sex symbol?
He sighs. "There is no enduring status. I have no answer to any of that, and I don't see it in my life. I think I play a character that likes to fuck and happens to fuck a lot on the show, and that might be something people enjoy, but other than that... I mean, the guy has a healthy libido. That's about all that's healthy about him. I don't have anything to say about that. It's flattering that anybody could—at a certain age and a certain paunch and a certain baldness— the fact that anyone would suppose their attention on you is extremely flattering."
What's the last dream you remember?
"Nah. I'm not talking about my dreams. They get enough of me. They don't need my dreams."
11. James Gandolfini picks up a green crayon from the table and starts drawing on the edge of the next table's paper tablecloth. First he doodles a cartoon face, then a three-dimensional cube. He says he often draws cubes, so I ask him what they represent. I offer suggestions. Building blocks? Prisons? He doesn't answer, just looks at me in a way that suggests he may pity how my mind works.
We stumble into talking about the things that keep him awake at night, and he says that he has learned in recent years that "it's just feelings—and feelings, as they say, aren't facts. You have to be careful, because some feelings are just feelings."
I ask him where he picked up wisdom like this.
"I don't know. Some people a lot smarter than me have told me certain things. And I've learned a lot from the therapy sessions in the show. And some therapy on my own."
He says he never ends up going to anybody for too long but that it was useful during his divorce. (His divorce from the mother of his son was, to judge from its tabloid echoes, a rough one, though he mentions how well they now get along.) He went to therapy again a couple of weeks ago. "Then I went away, and that all got shot to hell," he says. "I try it occasionally, that's all."
I ask him whether it's stranger when he goes to therapy because he acts out so many therapy sessions at work on The Sopranos.
"No," he scoffs. "They're completely separate. I'm not that crazy. No. Tony Soprano does not enter into my psyche in that way."
Later I mention that three years ago he described himself as "a 260-pound Woody Allen."
"There is that," he says.
But less so now?
"It's 270 now. But yeah, it's less so, a little bit."
How important is happiness to you?
"It wasn't for a long time. I didn't even mind wallowing in misery occasionally. I found that enjoyable. But when your son comes along, you want to try and show as much of the good stuff that's out there to him. Because there's plenty of good stuff."
How happy are you these days?
"I think I'm content. Reasonably content. But still twitchy."
Chris Heath is a GQ writer-at-large.