Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin

facility for inhabiting and deepening the role of Tony. His charisma, his petulance, his capacity for violence, his vulnerability—all of it bubbled and seethed beneath the surface as Gandolfini read at the audition.
    “I felt this gut thing, that it was him, but David took some convincing. He loved Stevie Van Zandt,” said Fitzgerald, who became Gandolfini’s fiercest advocate. Gandolfini met with Chase in Los Angeles for three hours one Friday, and Fitzgerald called excitedly Saturday morning. “Is it him?” she asked breathlessly. “He said, ‘I don’t know. . . .’ ‘No, seriously, is it him?’ ‘He’s a pain in the ass on set.’ ‘I don’t care about that,’” said Fitzgerald.
“‘Is it him?
’”
    Chase came around, but he now faced Albrecht’s worries about such an unusual leading man. “Rispoli had done a fantastic job, and his was a much more accessible Tony,” Albrecht said. “David said, ‘Look, in the real world it would be Jimmy.’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ It wasn’t a long conversation.” (Gandolfini, for his part, understood the reservations: “This was an incredible leap of faith. I mean, it wasn’t four pretty women in Manhattan [as in
Sex and the City
]. This was a bunch of fat guys from Jersey.”)
    The rest of the cast fell eclectically into place. With an unknown in the lead, Lorraine Bracco, as Tony’s therapist, Jennifer Melfi, was the closest thing to a star; she and others would often say later that she had originally been called to play Carmela Soprano, but that casting was never likely, if only because it would have too closely aped her role in
GoodFellas
.
From that movie, too, came an intense downtown New York theater actor and screenwriter, Michael Imperioli, to play Christopher Moltisanti. “He was already in the pantheon,” Chase explained. John Ventimiglia read for nearly every male role in the script before landing the part of Artie Bucco.
    For Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, the team uncovered a rare and rough gem: Tony Sirico had played mobsters previously, notably for Woody Allen and James Toback, and he lent the cast a frisson of mobster street cred, having served time himself for some long-ago offense. As Paulie, his performance bordered on the savant; it was difficult to tell where the actor ended and the character began. As his germaphobic, immaculately dressed character might have done, Sirico insisted on preparing his own hair each day, often rising at three a.m. at his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to coif before reporting for an early shoot. Wherever he went, a fog of Drakkar Noir cologne followed, lingering for days in the clothing of female staffers whom he never missed an opportunity to embrace.
    The most difficult role to fill proved to be Carmela. Days before shooting was scheduled to start, the part remained empty. Here,
Oz
,
which would provide a pool of talent for many future shows of the Third Golden Age, made its first contribution. Edie Falco had spent three seasons playing single mother and prison guard Diane Whittlesey on that show, about as far from a suburban Mob housewife as it’s possible to get. Nevertheless, she said, “Maybe it’s because I’m part Italian, or grew up on Long Island, but I read the part and thought, ‘I know exactly who this woman is. I can feel her already.’” After watching Falco reading two scenes—one in which Carmela tells Tony he’s going to hell as he enters an MRI machine and one in which Tony admits he’s started taking Prozac—the producers agreed, and Diane Whittlesey was sent on permanent “vacation.”
    The Sopranos
pilot filmed in New Jersey over two weeks in the summer of 1997. Within days, Chase received powerful confirmation that casting Gandolfini had been the right move. He was directing a scene in which Christopher is complaining to Tony about not receiving enough credit for a job. As written, Tony gives him a quick slap, but instead, “Jim fucking