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It’s been almost two decades since The Sopranos aired its final episode, yet the HBO series — and its antiheroic patriarch Tony Soprano — remains as exulted, and relevant, as ever. In a new biography, critic and historian Jason Bailey paints an insightful and expansive portrait of star James Gandolfini using research and original interviews with his family, friends and, often most pointedly, his Sopranos castmembers. In this exclusive excerpt, Bailey shares just a few of the anecdotes that highlight the late Gandolfini’s fierce dedication to his co-stars, his struggles keep his professional stamina through seven grueling seasons, and the way his presence off-screen influenced the series — from his work to advocate for higher salaries across the board to the time he saved a pivotal sunrise shot on location in Las Vegas. Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend is on shelves April 29.
Goodbye, Tony
HBO’s breaking and branding of the final season into two parts—a strategy subsequently aped by Mad Men and Breaking Bad, among others—was deeply cynical in nature. These were, for all intents and purposes, two seasons, a sixth and seventh, written, produced, and released separately, just shorter than usual, and with a briefer hiatus between them. According to Chase, it was purely a contractual and thus financial decision, an attempt to avoid yet another round of salary renegotiations, for “the actors, specifically,” he said. To that end, it failed; before production commenced in July 2006, Tony Sirico and Steven Van Zandt indicated that they would walk away from the final season unless their salaries were raised for the last nine episodes, while Lorraine Bracco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Robert Iler, and Steven Schirripa similarly took the opportunity to renegotiate their deals. Jim, with his contract for $1 million per episode locked into place, quietly helped his castmates get their raises. (Chase logically refers to the final nine episodes as season 7, and we will follow his lead.)
Gandolfini approached his own work with something less than a full heart; no doubt thanks to the extended shoots of season 6 and the shorter-than-usual hiatus following them, he was suffering from a bit of burnout. “By the end, I had a lot of anger over things, and I think it was just from being tired, and what in God’s name would I have to be angry about?” he later reflected. “[Chase] gave me such a gift in terms of life experience, in terms of acting experience, in terms of money too.”
“Toward the end of ‘The Sopranos’ he was tired of it and he was tired of me,” Chase said in 2019. “And I was tired of his foibles. That’s all.”
“I can’t see myself doing a show like that again,” Gandolfini said, a few years later. “It takes too much. When it ended, it was time—more than time. It had been a long run and as much as I loved the people I had to move on. And hell, half of ’em were dead anyway.”
There would be one more snag in the home stretch, however. Shortly after production was scheduled to begin in July 2006, Albrecht announced that the show was pausing in order to allow Jim time to deal with an old knee injury that would require surgery. It would only halt production for a few weeks, but it pushed the season 7 premiere to April 2007, to prevent the show from competing with the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and other Sunday events early in the year.
His surgery also required some slight reconfiguration of the shooting schedule. The season premiere, “Soprano Home Movies,” in which Tony and Carmela visit Bobby and Janice at their lake house, was shot on location, but the climactic brawl between the two men was too dangerous to stage that close to Gandolfini’s procedure; “I can’t do this,” Jim said. “I can’t do it the right way.” Months later, when the physicality was less of an issue, the interior was re-created at Silvercup Studios. “We shot for a day and a half, and Jim and I said, ‘Let’s make this as real as we possibly can,’” Schirripa said. “So the stuntmen choreographed it, but aside from Jim at the end falling into the table, that’s all us. It’s all me and Jim.” The result was a rough, ugly, clumsily realistic fight, two big dudes that have hit their limit with each other. “It was two fat, sweaty polar bears fighting,” Schirripa said, with a laugh. “That’s how a real fight is.”
This would not be the most harrowing physical action of the season, however. In the third-to-last episode, “The Second Coming,” Tony barely saves A.J. from a drowning death by suicide, leaping into their backyard pool (which had once housed his beloved ducks) to heave his son back from the brink. He initially berates the boy before giving in to empathy, cradling him as if he’s a baby again, and crying with him. It’s a powerful scene, and some of the most wrenching acting of the entire series. “It was a lot easier because we were miserable,” Iler says. “It was December in New Jersey, and we were jumping into a pool and then getting out of the pool and laying on the freezing cold cement. It wasn’t one of those things like, we were in LA and I’m jumping into this nice pool and it’s sunny out and there’s music. Like, it was it was fucking weird.”
Jim took the opportunity to blow off some steam during a shoot in Miami. Location manager Mark Kamine recalls going back to the company’s hotel after a day of shooting to find everyone, from the star to the production assistants, partying at the hotel pool; Jim greeted him by handing over a bottle of cognac. The party got rowdy and a few other guests complained, so the group moved to a nearby beach, drinking beers in the sand and contemplating a midnight swim. “The waves sound pretty big,” Karmine told Jim. “I mean, there might be a rip current or something.”
“What, you’re gonna save me, Mark?” Jim asked with a smirk, before running in.
“He just wanted to keep going,” Kamine says. “He was inclusive, you know? He wasn’t snobby, there wasn’t like, Those people can’t be here, because they’re below the line or they’re not producers or actors. It was just, Whatever. You want to party? You’re in. It was nice.”
Chase chose to direct “Made in America,” the series finale—his first time in the director’s chair since the pilot episode. Perhaps as it was his preferred setting, the last table read was held in the writers’ room. When it was done, “there was pin-drop silence,” Kornacki says. “Everyone just sat around that table. Usually people get up, you know, Hey, OK, great. Yeah, see you on set, laughing, joking, haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks or whatever. But everyone was planted in that seat, pin-drop silence. And you could hear sobbing, like this subtle sobbing from people. There was just this very dramatic sense of like, It’s over. What are we going to do next? And it was just incredibly sad.”
Production on the episode was similarly heightened. “It was very emotional,” Chase recalled, “and I remember Silvio didn’t die of course, but he was comatose in bed, and I remember when we called a wrap on Stevie, Jim came to me and said, ‘Well, that’s the end of you and me working with a rock ’n’ roll star.’” He laughed at this memory, but it was a bittersweet one. “I felt it then, and I felt it about Jim, because I also felt, ‘That’s the end of you and me working together.’”
On March 22, 2007, the cast and crew assembled at Holsten’s Brookdale Confectionery in Bloomfield, New Jersey, to shoot what would be the final scene of the final episode. Word had leaked, so dozens of onlookers assembled outside of the old-fashioned ice cream parlor; one enterprising soul was even selling shirts, at $20 a pop, with an image of the establishment and the words “The Final Episode.” (It almost hadn’t come to pass; Chase had written the scene with Holsten’s specified, but just a week before its scheduled shoot date, the Bloomfield Town Council barred the show from shooting there, bowing to pressure from the mayor and local Italian-American groups—one last representation controversy for the road. The decision was overturned, and the shoot was rescheduled.)
“Normally when we shot, we shot onstage, or even when we shot outside, it was as if people didn’t know what was going on,” Iler says. “But the word got out that we were shooting ‘the last scene,’ the finale there. They blacked out the windows and all this stuff, and when you would go outside, it was Jersey—it couldn’t be more of a place where people love the show. So that was something that was odd and not something you were used to. Normally you have the vibe of the scene, you walk in the door, you’re ready to go; this threw you off. When you were outside, it was like, Oh my God, people yelling stuff at you and asking you questions. And then you kind of shut that door, like OK, now we’re at your fucking work.”
“It just felt like another average day,” Chase said of that shoot. “It was all about the work, you know?” As far as Jim’s performance: “I don’t think I gave him any direction. I don’t think he needed it.”
At the end of every season, Jim had given generous gifts to the cast and crew. His final parting gift to his colleagues was the most extravagant yet: He gave every member of the company, every actor, writer, producer, and crew member—over two hundred in all—a special-edition Kobold watch, with the words “RIP Sopranos 1997–2007” engraved on the back. “He must have spent who knows how much money, I can’t even imagine, over half a million dollars,” Schirripa marvels. “I’ve never worn mine. It’s in a safe deposit box.”
He had another parting, and non-monetary, gesture of kindness in store. In a departure from production norms, the last scenes shot were not for the last episode of the show; after production wrapped on “Made in America,” director Alan Taylor returned to shoot the closing scenes for the fourth-to-last show, “Kennedy and Heidi.” “Because it was in Vegas, that was put at the end of the whole schedule for the last season,” Taylor explained. “The entire series was done, and we flew out to Vegas and stayed at Caesars Palace.”
In the closing scene, Tony watches the sun rise over Red Rock Canyon and cries, “I get it.” The location was about an hour outside of Vegas, with pre-dawn call time. “It’s the middle of the night, like 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning, and the gate is locked,” recalls director of photography Alik Sakharov. “There’s a caravan of trucks sitting outside, waiting. And we’re going crazy. The sun is gonna rise in a couple of minutes, and we need to set up a shot.” Finally the proper authority, who had overslept, showed up to unlock the gate. “And we now have literally about twenty-five minutes before sunrise, and we need to set the truck, we need to set the cameras, multiple cameras, we had to put Jim in clothes, we’ve got to line up everything, and we’ve got to shoot it Who’s the first one to roll up his sleeves? Jimmy. He’s in the fucking grip truck, throwing things out to the crew, helping out, basically—sandbags, track, dolly.”
Sakharov tried to stop him: “Jimmy, man, go get dressed!”
“I just need a shirt, that’s all,” Gandolfini insisted. “Just a shirt and maybe some powder. That’s it.”
Finally, with three minutes to go before sunrise and the crew finishing their preparation, Jim went to his mark. Makeup patted him down—he’d worked up a coat of sweat during the setup—and powdered him up; the costumer threw his shirt on him. “Camera moves,” Sakharov chuckles, “sun comes up, and Jimmy kills it in one take. Got it with two cameras. And that was it. That was Jimmy, man. That’s what kind of person he was.”
Excerpt from the upcoming book Gandolfini: Jim, Tony & the Life of a Legend (Abrams Press) by Jason Bailey, on-sale April 29, 2025
© 2025 Jason Bailey
