James Gandolfini drunkenly vowed “every other day” to quit The Sopranos.
The actor played mob boss Tony Soprano in the smash HBO mafia drama from 1999 to 2007. Sadly, he was killed by a heart attack aged 51 in 2013 after years of drug and alcohol issues.
His co-star Steven Van Zandt, 73, who played Tony’s ‘consiglieri’ Silvio Dante on the HBO hit, has now opened up about how James struggled making the series. He says on new documentary ‘Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos’: “Every other day, we would go to a bar.
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“We would have the exact same conversation. We would get drunk. He’d say, ‘I’m done. I’m not going back’. I would say, ‘Okay. You’ve got a hundred people depending on you here’.
(Image: Getty Images)
“He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay’. He would come back. But a few times, he would disappear for a few days. You know, it just got to him.”
‘Wise Guy’ also includes interviews with ‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase, who recently said James left him mesmerised with his “otherworldly” eyes.
(Image: Contract Number (Programme))
Former HBO CEO Chris Albrecht recalled how he once staged an intervention with Gandolfini to try to get the actor to enter rehab because of his alcohol struggles. “We did an intervention with him at my apartment in New York,” Albrecht said.
“That was to try to get him to go to a facility for rehab. We’d had a lot of friction by that point. The ruse was that I was inviting Jimmy over so we could talk things through and kind of clear the air. And then he came up.
(Image: Getty Images)
We’d had the rehearsal the day before or whatever — his sister, everybody were there — and he saw everybody sitting there, and he went, ‘Aw, f— this.’ … He turned to me and he went, ‘Fire me,’ and he left.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
