He was known for playing Tony Soprano—a brutish, selfish, abusive thug, a criminal and philanderer and cold-blooded killer. But there were miles of real estate between James Gandolfini and the character that made him famous, as anyone who knew Gandolfini could tell you.

So on this, the 10-year anniversary of his untimely and unexpected passing, we spoke to more than two dozen of his costars, collaborators, and friends, to get a better picture of the real James Gandolfini. They agreed on many things: his warmth, his generosity, his sense of humor, his intensity as an actor. The only thing they really split on was what to call him.

Susan Aston (longtime acting partner and coach): It’s funny, because you can tell when somebody met him by what they call him. When I met him, he was James, and he didn’t start going by Jim till later.

Karen Duffy (entertainment journalist and high school classmate): Yeah, it was Jimmy, Bucky, and James.

Drea de Matteo (costar, The Sopranos): I called him Jim or Jimmy. Yeah. James? No. [laughs]

Vincent Curatola (costar, The Sopranos): I think his sisters called him Jamie.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus (costar, Enough Said): I called him Jim.

Edie Falco (costar, The Sopranos): When I first met him, I asked him, “What do I call you?” And he said, “Whatever you want,” which was no help at all! But I called him Jim.

Jake Scott (director, Welcome to the Rileys): His appearance and his size was imposing. So, you know, you approached him cautiously. But he was a big, gentle, beautiful, warm, loving human. So you felt you earned the right to call him Jim or Jimmy.

Mykelti Williamson (costar, 12 Angry Men): I’d seen his work. But we got to the stage at Paramount, and he’s just the coolest, down-to-earth, New Jersey/New York–type personality. He was just a sweetheart of a guy—but you could tell that there’s a sharp edge on the other end of that thing too.

John Magaro (costar, Not Fade Away and Down the Shore): When I first met him, you know, it’s him, and he’s intimidating. He just has a presence about him. He was a big guy. And he’s not super talkative, he’s not super jokey. But then once you crack the outer shell, you understand that Jim is hilarious, likes to goof around.

Mimi Kennedy (costar, In the Loop): I just felt like I was in fifth grade with him. He was the freest actor that I’ve ever worked opposite, because of that 11-year-old energy of just, “Yeah, we’re in this. They think we’re supposed to do this, but I’m gonna make you laugh.” And I always would laugh.

De Matteo: The ongoing joke we used to—oh, this is so fucked up, I don’t even know if I should be divulging this kind of information—but my friend Ginger, who was a PA on the show at the time…we used to walk around and make, like, the sound of a faucet going. Meaning, like, we need a cold shower, every time we walked by Jim. Who knew that we would have crushes on this big, hulking, balding, middle-aged man?

Rosanna Arquette (costar, Gun): He has those very compassionate, empathetic eyes. When you connect with somebody’s eyes, as an actor, you really can connect in that way immediately.

Tony Danza (costar, 12 Angry Men): He had a different look than anybody else. He wasn’t what you expected for an Italian leading man. And he had a real…he had such an ease of delivery. The guy was really, really good.

“The value in Meisner is, you know, listening and paying attention and looking at somebody, and when they go, just going with them. ” —Gandolfini on his method (2004)

Steven Van Zandt (costar, The Sopranos): You did a scene with Jimmy, and you walked away a better actor.

Julianna Margulies (costar, The Sopranos): It’s like tennis—when you play with a better player, your game improves. It’s just how it is; you just play better. You don’t have to hit the ball very hard because they’re hitting it so hard. All you have to do is put your racket out.

Lorraine Bracco (costar, The Sopranos): He was a great ping-pong player when it came to acting.

Steve Schirripa (costar, The Sopranos): He would say to you, “You want another take? You’re okay with that? You’re good?” He was deeply concerned that you were okay.

Vincent Pastore (costar, The Sopranos): Jimmy would say, “Are you happy?” And I said I dunno, and he turned around to one of the guys behind the camera and says, “Give him another take.”

Marcia Gay Harden (costar, God of Carnage): The cream should rise to the top, even if it means at his own expense. And he looks out for everybody around him. He’s looking out on the 360 for everybody around him. And I was really impressed by that. Because obviously not everybody of his stature does that.

Geoffrey Fletcher (director, Violet & Daisy): He has a monologue late in our film that is performed so sensitively and imaginatively. After seeing the film for the first time, he shocked me when he suggested that his monologue might be a little long. He was more concerned about the movie’s overall rhythm than the monologue that he had mastered. His idea inspired an unusual bit of intercutting that really worked. He was such an intelligent artist.

Aston: I’ve heard him talk sometimes like he just learned his lines and tries not to bump into furniture, the Spencer Tracy thing. But that wasn’t true. That was a big fat lie.

Schirripa: Jim was very serious about his work. Very, very, very, very serious. He thought things out.

Aston: We would leave the set. He would go home and shower, I would go home, and then I would come back over to his apartment at midnight to work the next day’s scenes. I mean, we were just madmen. Nobody slept. It was crazy.

Schirripa: He would say to me, before the season, “Let’s go down to Little Italy, have dinner. I want to just be around, kind of get to feel that thing again.” Because Jim was not Tony Soprano. You know, he was a Birkenstock-wearing, music-loving guy. He was kind of a hippie. He was not that guy at all.

Famke Janssen (costar, Down the Shore): I was struck mostly by his lovable energy, not at all what one would expect, obviously. And then in reading with him, what I was struck by was his unpredictability as an actor. And that’s what made him so fantastic to watch.

Kathleen Quinlan (costar, A Civil Action): He had this incredible ability to make it all very real in that moment. And that really struck me because, you know, sometimes as actors, we can see the actors working the words. And I couldn’t really see that.

Falco: He didn’t let himself get bossed around by a lot of the things that I let walk me around—this good-student mentality. I always had to get the lines just right and do the blocking exactly the same every time. And I would watch him, and he was following something…bigger. And deeper. If he had an impulse to say something a little different, or to change the blocking, he just did it. And I was jealous that he had somehow gotten permission from himself to do that kind of thing.

Danza: I watched him work with Jack. When you’re working with Jack Lemmon, for Chrissakes, you’ve got to—first of all, it makes you better, because he’s so good. But at some point…I look at everything like a fight for some reason, I guess because of my background. And he was holding his own. Yeah, he was holding his own.

Falco: When he showed up on set, it’s kind of…you’ve got to be present. You can’t do it the way you rehearsed it in your bathroom, you know what I mean? And what could possibly be more fun than that, from a performance point of view?

Williamson: You feel like you knew a guy like that, you know?

Schirripa: Jamie-Lynn Sigler told me an incredible story. It was early on, and they were in the car together. It was, I think, the college episode. And she was a little nervous, and Jim said, “Just look me in the eyes and talk to me. Just look me in the eyes and talk to me.” He had a way of making you feel calm.

Nicole Holofcener (director, Enough Said): He was really attentive to people in smaller roles and the crew, really attentive. There’s always a PA or an AD that hangs around the trailers just to take care of the actors, and what they need, and walk them to the set. And there was this one woman who was sitting out there in the sun, day after day, and he showed up with a chair and an umbrella for her. Without asking.

Margulies: They had me in these really high heels, and I kept having to run up and down stairs. And I sat down and I was very quiet about it. But he saw it, and he goes, “Your feet are killing you, aren’t they?” I was like, “Shhhh, it’s really painful!”

And he was like, “C’mere, I’m really good at this.” And he massaged my feet on set, and was so sweet and kind about it. Not in a perverted way. It was just actor to actor, like, “I do not know how you women do this.”

Schirripa: I was just episode-to-episode that first season. And I remember, I was just waiting for my ride back, and he was leaving in his car with his driver. And he had the window down. I said, “I’ll see you, Jim.” And he had the guy back the car all the way up and got out, and he said, “I’ll see you again.”

I thought that was pretty nice: the star of the show, this huge star, coming back. I was a nobody. I was a day player.

Joe Pantoliano (costar, The Sopranos): My first day on the job was a scene between him and me outside of a pizzeria in New Jersey, and we had our niceties. And in between takes, he looked me in the eye and he said, “Listen, it’s an honor and a pleasure to be working with you.”

It’s very hard for an actor coming into a show—a lot of actors are day players, or they’re on an episode with two scenes. But he always went out of his way to make sure that everybody was comfortable.

Pastore: The whole thing about Jimmy is, we were family on and off the camera.

“My parents worked hard, were honest, were good people. As I’ve said before, I’m standing on their shoulders here because they worked so hard and enabled me to go to college, and these are the kind of people that I love. And these are the kind of people that I want to show in movies, because I think they’re getting screwed. If I have any power as an actor, that’s where it comes from.” —Gandolfini on what drives him (2004)

Louis-Dreyfus: He was a very tenderhearted, thoughtful man.

Danza: The thing that always touched me was that he was so giving…. Once you were his friend, you know, you were his friend.

Rod Lurie (director, The Last Castle): There was no such thing as bringing a wallet to any restaurant you went with James Gandolfini to. There’s no such thing. He felt embarrassed by the amount of money that he was making, I think. And he wanted to share it.

Louis-Dreyfus: I don’t know if this is true, but I think he was almost embarrassed to be an actor. I think he was sort of at odds with himself in that sense.

Patore: Jimmy didn’t want to be a star. He wanted to be an actor.

Van Zandt: I remember, this might have been the second-season wrap party, when we really had become super big. We’re planning the party, and I said, “You really need a VIP section.” And he was like, “Oh, I don’t want a VIP section.” I said, “Jimmy, trust me on this, okay.”

He’s like, “Nah, no, no, no, no.” So we put the VIP section up anyway, and at first he wouldn’t go in there—and of course, he got attacked by a thousand people. About an hour into the thing, he stumbles into the VIP section saying, “Okay, okay, I get it now! I give up!”

Aston: I think he got used to nice things, but he was happy in a very modest apartment with, you know, the same old leather jacket, brown leather jacket, and jeans and T-shirts.

Van Zandt: I mean, the first time he got a big raise, he split it up amongst the cast. Unbelievable.

Pastore: The main people got a bonus that his production company sent us. Who does that?

De Matteo: He pulled each and every one of us in his trailer during work one day and gave us all a check. I remember, I think, it was for $36,000.

Schirripa: He handed everybody a check and said, “Thanks for sticking by me.” That’s all he said.

De Matteo: And I was like, “Jim, I’m not taking this check. Are you insane, dude?” He’s like, “Everyone’s taking it, and if you don’t take it, it’s going in the garbage. So you may as well take it.”

Pantoliano: He wrote checks to a lot of people that didn’t have the power to get the raises. So he was extraordinary in that way.

De Matteo: I think he felt like he had hit the jackpot, and he just wanted to fuckin’ share it with everybody. He was just a different…he’s just a different breed. A completely different breed.

“I found this silly way of living that allows me to occasionally stand up for [working people] a little bit. And mostly make some good money and act like a silly fool." —Gandolfini on his job (2004)

Bracco: He was a pain in my ass [laughs]. What happened was, he would do his sides first because he was the precursor of the story. Then when he was finished, he was relaxed and done with it. He didn’t care, it was over for him, except we had to turn around and do my part. He would dance…he was crazy! Mooning occurred. He had an ass the size of Staten Island!

Magaro: I think he saw himself as more of a Jackie Gleason than he did a Tony Soprano.

Bracco: He was a big teddy bear.

Scott: Jimmy, if he said it, he meant it. You know, no bullshit. He never lied, he didn’t. He was an honest boy.

Arquette: I loved him. He was just a pleasure, a wonderful, sweet human being to work with.

*“It’s like showing emotion has become a bad thing. Like there’s something wrong with you, and you’re really in love or really angry and you show it. Like if you feel those powerful emotions and you express them, instead of keeping them inside or expressing yourself politely, then you must be someone who needs therapy, or Prozac. That’s the world we’re in right now.” —*Gandolfini on his openness (1999)

Jon Alpert (codirector, the Gandolfini-produced documentaries Alive Day Memories and Wartorn: 1861-2010): There was a real sincerity. Listen, I’ve been doing this type of work for a half century. I’m really lucky to have been able to do it; I’m lucky to be alive myself. But I’ve seen practitioners of this who throw on a switch and pretend that they care, and it’s almost like an exsanguination—they suck the blood out of you for their interview, and then they’re off to the next one.

Jim was not like that. And he did not have to act. All he had to do was open up the door of his own soul, which he always shared with the people that he was interviewing.

Kennedy: He had a moral righteousness inside him, and when you ticked him off in those terms, something that he didn;t think was the right thing to do, you could feel it.

Fletcher: He played tough guys so compellingly that I think people would be astonished by his intellect. At dinner before a screening at the Savannah Film Festival, he spoke about the diminishing size of the crabs in parts of New Jersey and its greater implications while sounding like a marine biologist and climatologist.

Gay Harden: I used to go to him for relationship advice, because he was so really, actually honest of the heart. It wasn’t just in his jokey way or a sexual way. It was just our relationship. The two of us would sit and talk about trust and love and men and anthropology and women, and just all of it. And he always just spoke from the heart and spoke so generously.

Margulies: I was 38 at the time, and I was single and very happy. And he looked at me and he said, “No kids for you?” And I said, “No, I don’t think I’m into kids.”

And he said, “They’re the biggest joy of my life. Have a kid.” And he got so gentle and soft and mushy about his kids. It was just beautiful. And I never thought of him as that kind of guy until he started talking about his children and then trying to sell me on the idea of having kids. Like, “Julianna, I’m telling you, it will enrich your life. You’ll become a better actor, you’ll become a better human being.”

Lurie: I remember just this image, this beautiful image: I’m up in the warden’s office, which we built, and looking down on the yard. It’s just this vast prison yard. And this giant man is walking across the yard with his, I think, two-year-old son. The kid can barely walk, and he’s holding his hand. And it was just this beautiful image.

Janssen: It was beautiful, just seeing him as a dad. Just to witness the beauty of that relationship with the two of them and how much Michael looked up to him. Yeah, it was a beautiful thing. And I’ve seen [Michael] over the years, and he’s doing so well. Jim would be so proud.

Lurie: The other thing that was dichotomous about him was, he also had—please quote this qualifier I’m putting with this now—he had a wonderful ego. He was proud that he was an athlete, right? Even if he was a little heavy. And there is a scene in the movie where the warden is outside playing basketball while all the inmates are inside and cannot go out into the yard. And he’s supposed to be missing baskets. But Jimmy said, “I don’t miss baskets.” And I said, “Yeah, but Colonel Winter does.” 

So we get out there. And I yell action, and I swear to you, he makes 20 baskets in a row before he says, “Okay, now I’ll be Colonel Winter.” And then he misses the baskets.

Falco: We were doing a scene where he’s eating ice cream in the middle of the scene. And then we had to do it again. And we had to do it again. And every time, even when they said cut, he continued to eat the ice cream. And they put more in, and they put more in, and eventually he would kind of look at me to say his line…and he wasn’t home. He was in, like, a full-blown sugar coma. Just from—he looked like a giant toddler.

And he kind of looked at me, and I realized, Holy crap, he doesn’t remember his lines. So anyway, we had to wrap the scene and reshoot it another day because he had too much ice cream.

Duffy: One of the things that is so beautiful, that gets me really choked up, is that…Jim went on a rocket ride, being on The Sopranos. And at every one of those events, he brought our high school collection of mugs. The knuckleheads that we grew up with were now grown men, but he had his high school best friends. They were the ones that he had walk on the red carpet with him and attend the parties. I don’t know. I just love that. That shows you who he is.

Alpert: He was so excited about documentaries, and he joined our board of directors. And, you know, it was really cool to have Jim Gandolfini at the board meetings. But he really was most enthusiastic about helping the high school kids that come here. That’s a side to him that nobody ever saw, except the people who were in the programs that he used to come and help.

Schirripa: Some family contacted him. This guy was—he’d passed away. He was a retired cop, or a cop. He didn’t die in the line of duty, but he was a huge fan. And somehow the family got to Jim and contacted him, and Jim went to the guy’s funeral. He didn’t know anyone. He went by himself, drove in his car in New Jersey, and went and met the family and gave them a hug, and went to this policeman’s funeral.

Curatola: He called me on Christmas morning, I think it was 2010. And he called me up: “Merry Christmas, bah bah, let me say hi to Maureen.” I said, “Jim, I’m on my way to the hospital. We put her in the hospital two days ago. She has something going on with vision. She’s at Hackensack Hospital, New Jersey.”

“I’m coming.”

“No, Jim. No, no, it’s Christmas morning. Do what you gotta do.” “No, I’m coming. Fuck you. I’m gonna be there.” “Jimmy, stop!”

He shows up at the hospital with his wife, Deborah [Lin], sat in the room. We were there about an hour and a half. We ordered coffee, doughnuts, whatever. And this was Christmas Day.

My wife was great three days after that, but she had to spend Christmas in there. And Jimmy came.

Louis-Dreyfus: I wish he was still alive. I miss that guy.

Bracco: He was a delicious guy. He really was.