The Sopranos (TV Program)

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      How the ‘Many Saints of Newark’ Stars Remade Key ‘Sopranos’ Roles

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      Actors in the prequel had to put their stamp on favorite characters from the original series, whether they had watched it or not.From its debut in 1999 to its blackout finale in 2007, “The Sopranos” set a seemingly unsurpassable benchmark for acting. The cast members of that HBO crime drama, leading players and supporting performers alike, became synonymous with the menacing mobsters and manipulative family members they portrayed. When it was all over, you couldn’t imagine anyone else playing those roles.This posed a problem for the creators of “The Many Saints of Newark,” the cinematic prequel that explores the origins of “The Sopranos” during the 1960s and ’70s, and that enlists new actors to play younger versions of those indelible characters.It also a presented a challenge for the actors in “The Many Saints of Newark” — some of whom were “Sopranos” fans and others who had never watched the series — and who had to walk a careful line between preserving what audiences already expected from their characters and putting their own stamps on the roles.Vera Farmiga, who plays the film’s Livia Soprano, explained that their task was complicated by the typical time constraints of making a movie. “We didn’t have the luxury that a series allows you — that indulgence to get to know your character and get multiple tries at them,” she said. “I could do the ‘Saturday Night Live’ version, but you have very little time to get it right. And what does right even mean?”Here, five stars from “The Many Saints of Newark” discuss how they landed their roles and prepared to live up to the standards of “The Sopranos.”Vera FarmigaRole: Livia SopranoOriginated by: Nancy MarchandWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? NoWhen Farmiga, a star of “Up in the Air” and the series “Bates Motel,” was approached to play the role of Tony Soprano’s controlling mother, Livia, she knew that it was significant — but only by proxy. “There were loads of giddy responses around me,” Farmiga said. “My husband was freaking out. My agents were freaking out.” Though she hadn’t seen the series when it first aired, she said, “I understood that it was a cultural phenomenon. I understood it came with a legacy.” Farmiga also found it meaningful that David Chase, the “Sopranos” creator and “Many Saints” co-screenwriter, did not require her to audition: “All he wanted to do is meet up at a really beautiful spot and eat together,” she said. “So we blasted through a couple bottles of white wine at dessert. We got loaded and jacked up on sugar.” For her performance, Farmiga studied the work of Marchand, who died in 2000, and requested a prosthetic nose to more closely resemble her. Farmiga also sought guidance from Chase, who based Livia on his own mother. But the screenwriter proved to be characteristically tight-lipped, as Farmiga recalled: “I would press David — let’s talk about your mother. ‘Nah, she just was.’ But why? Was she dissatisfied with maternity? She wanted a career? ‘Nope. She just was. That’s who my mother was.’” Eventually, Farmiga said she found her answers in the screenplay: “You know what? Just give me the words,” she said.Corey StollRole: Corrado “Uncle Junior” Soprano Jr.Originated by: Dominic ChianeseWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? YesStoll, the ubiquitous star of television (“Billions,” “House of Cards”) and film (“Ant-Man”), was a “Sopranos” devotee who watched the series to its conclusion, then binged it again with his wife, Nadia Bowers, when she was pregnant with their son and yet again in preparation for this film. But Stoll said he may have gained just as much from catching a serendipitous revival-house showing of “The Godfather Part II,” in which Chianese, then in his 40s, played the mobster Johnny Ola. As Stoll explained, “It was super-helpful to see that Dominic Chianese, kind of like me, was always a little bit older than his years. I’ve been playing old men since I was 11. It was good to see that I didn’t have to do back flips to make him a young man. Just being in my body and in my voice, that is different enough.” His key to Uncle Junior, Stoll said, was listening to Chianese’s rhythmic speech patterns: “He has this staccato — he can speak very quickly and ratatat — and then he also has this wistful, lyrical mode that he goes into.” For extra motivation, before a scene Stoll would utter an obscene phrase favored by Junior that can’t be fully reproduced here — the first two words are “your sister’s.” “Sometimes shouting it, sometimes whispering it,” Stoll said. “But there’s something about those three words that just brought me right into character.”John MagaroRole: Silvio DanteOriginated by: Steven Van ZandtWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? YesMagaro (“First Cow”) became close with Chase when he starred in the writer’s 2012 directorial debut, “Not Fade Away.” As their friendship progressed, Chase shared a crucial piece of information: “David said that he was going to do a ‘Sopranos’ prequel,” recalled Magaro, who had no expectation he would be involved. “Then a couple of years passed and he and his producing partner Nicole Lambert, started mentioning, would you be willing to shave your head? Would you be willing to gain a lot of weight? It seemed like there was an idea of someone I could play in the film.” That turned out to be Silvio, created by Van Zandt, whom Magaro also knew from “Not Fade Away.” And there was plenty of source material that Magaro could study from the guitarist’s performances and interviews with the E Street Band: “There’s a confidence, there’s an ease to his language,” Magaro explained. “Even the way he carries his shoulders raised a bit from years of playing guitar. I kept an eye on that stuff and let it inform where I would go with the young Silvio.” The movie also confirms what some “Sopranos” viewers suspected about the older Silvio: that he is bald and wears a hairpiece. “To achieve that,” Magaro said, “I agreed to shave the horseshoe shape in my hair. For the ’60s version we would shave that every morning and make it look like a balding man. For the ’70s we would throw on a really crappy toupee.”From left, Samson Moeakiola as Big Pussy, Corey Stoll as Junior Soprano and Billy Magnussen as Paulie Walnuts.Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.Billy MagnussenRole: Paulie “Walnuts” GualtieriOriginated by: Tony SiricoWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? NoMagnussen, a dashing star of films like “Aladdin,” “Into the Woods” and “No Time to Die” and TV’s “Made For Love” may not immediately strike you as a young Paulie Walnuts, but he was just flattered to be a part of “The Many Saints of Newark.” As he explained, “I had the opportunity to audition for a different role” — he did not say which one — “and so I did an audition that way.” Through exaggeratedly clenched teeth, he added, “I guess I didn’t get that role. But they came back and they were like, hey, what do you think about trying Paulie? Would you want to do that? Knowing the ‘Sopranos’ legacy, I would be honored. Because, yeah, I think it’s a stretch. But isn’t that what acting is about?” To get into his role, Magnussen used a prosthetic nose (“My nose isn’t that wide, is it?”) and watched Sirico’s speech patterns on the TV series: “I had noticed how he talked out of the side of his mouth. And then it’s just sitting there with it, over and over again, to where you don’t have to think about it.” Magnussen may have undertaken other efforts to get to know his predecessor, too: “I broke into his house,” he said. “I went through his trash. I’m sure I slept in his underwear.”Samson MoeakiolaRole: Salvatore “Big Pussy” BonpensieroOriginated by: Vincent PastoreWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? NoMoeakiola, who is appearing in his first Hollywood film, didn’t have the benefit of a full immersion in the “Sopranos” TV series (“My parents wouldn’t let me sit around to watch it as a 7-year-old,” he said) or even know quite what he was auditioning for when he tried out for what he was told was called “Untitled New Jersey Project.” But as he remembered, “on the breakdown you can see who’s directing and who’s producing. I saw Alan Taylor and then I saw David Chase, and I was like, oh, this is ‘The Sopranos.’” But once he landed the role, Moeakiola got a leg up from Pastore, who befriended him and helped him practice dialogue. “We were on the phone at first and he was like, ‘Let me hear you, you do it first,’” Moeakiola said. “Finally I was like, just record it, bro.” Moeakiola also visited an acting class that Pastore teaches, but had to maintain strict omertà about his involvement in the film. “He was like, this is my nephew — don’t bother him, he’s not even here,” Moeakiola said. “Some students were like, you know, they’re making a prequel to ‘The Sopranos,’ you should play Vinny. I’m like, ah, I’m not an actor.” More

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      ‘The Many Saints of Newark’ Review: The Best Really Is Over

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      In the movie prequel to “The Sopranos,” Tony returns as a child who learns to navigate his families on a difficult road to mob power.Tony Soprano, the mob boss in “The Sopranos,” was many things: husband, father, animal lover, lady-killer, sociopathic capitalist, pop-culture sensation. Americans like their villains on the soft side, and Tony famously suffered from inner turmoil, manifested in panic attacks, to go with the blood on his hands. A mobster in therapy — with a sexy female shrink, no less — generated bountiful narrative tension, as did his overlapping gangland and extended families. All told, Tony was a perfect distillation of two great American passions: self-improvement and getting away with murder.Created by David Chase, “The Sopranos” faded to enigmatic black in 2007, though it endures, including on HBO, its original home for six seasons. As a rule, we use the present tense when writing about fiction: Characters exist in the eternal now, or that’s the idea. But the death of James Gandolfini, who played Tony, complicates this because he and the show were interchangeable. With his lucid, quicksilver expressivity and a hulking, powerfully threatening physicality, Gandolfini made flesh Tony’s internal struggle, filling a potential cartoon with soul and, by extension, giving greater depth to the show. His absence is why I think of his signature character in the past tense.It’s also a reason the movie spinoff “The Many Saints of Newark,” a busy, unnecessary, disappointingly ordinary origin story, doesn’t work. The movie certainly has pedigree. It was written by Chase with Lawrence Konner, who wrote a few episodes of “The Sopranos,” and directed by Alan Taylor, another series veteran. Jumping between time periods, it tracks the sentimental education (moral and emotional) of the young Tony, who in 1967 is an 11-year-old pipsqueak played by William Ludwig. After a lot of introductions and plot developments, the story jumps to Tony at 16, now played by Gandolfini’s son, Michael, who bears a striking resemblance to his father.The movie means to show how and why the child became the man we never see but who casts a deep shadow. Following along with this evolutionary journey will be easier for those who watched “The Sopranos,” week after week, for 86 episodes of detailed, intimate, explanatory character development. Whatever your familiarity with the series, you may soon find yourself wondering why the filmmakers decided the way to fill in Tony’s past was to delve into his early relationship with a dreary, clichéd surrogate father rather than, say, his monstrous mother, Livia (immortalized in the show by Nancy Marchand and played here by Vera Farmiga with a prodigious prosthetic nose).Tony’s symbolic dad in “Saints” is Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola, who can’t hold the center), a midlevel mob guy and father to the adult Tony’s mentee, Christopher, the drug-addled distant cousin and screw-up played by Michael Imperioli. Dickie never appeared onscreen in “The Sopranos,” but in the movie he takes on crucial twinned roles as Tony’s champion and as a progenitor of the violent, emotionally addled mobster Tony later becomes. It’s never clear why Dickie has a soft spot for the kid, other than it gives Tony a narratively convenient, relatively benign replacement for his more floridly violent, often absent dad. Mostly Dickie is a new toy that the filmmakers can play with.Too bad he’s right off the shelf. An amalgam of wiseguy clichés wrapped in a period-appropriate package, Dickie enters a crowded field of movie mob guys who are rarely as interesting as their makers believe. He has all the prerequisites, from the slick car to the sleek suits, and comes burdened with the usual work and women problems. Some of these headaches produce tension and promising interest, most notably Dickie’s relationship with a restless Black employee, Harold McBrayer (a nuanced, bristling Leslie Odom Jr.), whose discontent is mirrored, or is meant to be, by unrest that is based on what happened in Newark in 1967 after the arrest of a Black man.Both Harold’s prominence and the relatively few racist slurs dropped here are an index of the different cultural climates in which the movie and the show opened. Mobsters are going to mobster (bada-bing), but the language they use and the barbarisms they commit have been attenuated. And while the movie tries to engage race, its efforts are wan, cautious. By contrast, the women remain pretty much the same nagging wives, dutiful daughters and hot girlfriends, a.k.a. goomahs (bada-boom). The most important of these is a beauty, Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi), who’s brought from Italy by Dickie’s father (Ray Liotta) to be his wife; mostly, she’s around to flash booty and stir up Oedipal trouble.Movie spinoffs can be tough to pull off. Nothing felt at stake when I watched, oh, the first “Brady Bunch” movie, but its source material wasn’t a critical fetish, something that inspired excited discussions on masculinity, the latest golden age of television and the effect on the industry. “The Sopranos,” though, was too good, too memorable, and its hold on the popular imagination remains unshakable. It still casts a spell, and the movie knows it, which is why it sticks to the tired template of a boy’s own story rather than taking a radical turn, like revisiting Tony’s world from Giuseppina’s or Livia’s or Harold’s points of view. In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.The Many Saints of NewarkRated R for Mafia violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      'The Many Saints of Newark': A Guide to the ‘Sopranos’ Family Tree

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      A guide to the many mobsters of “The Many Saints of Newark” and how they prefigure the characters in the beloved series about New Jersey wiseguys.In the world of “The Sopranos,” there’s family, and then there’s “family” — those hard-won, deep-seated mob ties that make spiritual relations of every member of the Italian American mafia. Over the course of six seasons, that acclaimed HBO drama introduced us to several dozen members of New Jersey’s powerful DiMeo crime family, including its brilliant and fascinating kingpin, Tony Soprano, and the various uncles, cousins, rivals and lovers who fill out the engrossing drama of the character’s fraught, volatile life.“The Many Saints of Newark” is a prequel, set roughly 30 years before the start of the show, beginning in the late 1960s and spanning half a decade. Billed as a Tony Soprano origin story, it instead focuses largely on Dickie Moltisanti, a close friend and associate of the family who, seeing great potential in Tony, takes the young Soprano boy under his wing.“Many Saints” is a treat for “Sopranos” fans, full of subtle references to series lore and answers to longstanding questions, and it’s a delight to see younger versions of familiar faces. But the movie doesn’t make much of an effort to explain characters or their relationships to the uninitiated, and if it’s been a while since your last “Sopranos” binge, you may find it difficult to place each and every member of the family.Before “Many Saints” arrives in cinemas and on HBO Max on Oct. 1, here is a guide to who’s who in the New Jersey mob world.Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini, Michael Gandolfini)“The Sopranos” begins as the respected but beleaguered Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano enters therapy to get a handle on a series of increasingly severe panic attacks. “Many Saints” reveals Tony as a bright, charismatic teenager with ambitions to go to college and avoid the life of crime that is his ultimate destiny. Immortalized by James Gandolfini on the show, he’s played in the prequel by Gandolfini’s real-life son, Michael.In “Many Saints,” Alessandro Nivola plays the father of a key character in “The Sopranos,” Christopher Moltisanti.Warner Bros.Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola)Once an important and admired leader in the Jersey mafia, Dickie Moltisanti is killed long before the events of “The Sopranos,” under circumstances described — though never actually confirmed — as part of a story arc in the show’s fourth season. Dickie is the protagonist of “Many Saints,” and much about the tragedy of his life and death is disclosed in ways that longtime “Sopranos” fans will find thoroughly shocking. Though not family by blood, he’s welcomed as a brother by Junior Soprano and becomes an influential father figure to young Tony.Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli)Born around the time “Many Saints” is set, Christopher appears in the film only briefly, as a baby, in a scene with much foreboding. Son of Dickie and distant cousin of Tony’s wife, Carmela, he’s considered part of the Soprano family, usually referred to as Tony’s nephew. One of the main characters of the series, Christopher is a kind of scrappy ne’er-do-well whom Tony dreams of molding as his protégé — a dream often thwarted, throughout the series, by Chrissy’s tendency to screw up.Michael Gandolfini, left, and Jon Berthal in the prequel.Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros. Giovanni “Johnny Boy” Soprano (Joseph Siravo, Jon Bernthal)Giovanni “Johnny Boy” Soprano, Tony’s father, died of natural causes in the late ’80s, before the events of “The Sopranos,” and is glimpsed in the series only in flashbacks; one of those flashbacks is restaged in “Many Saints,” with Jon Bernthal now playing the Soprano patriarch in place of the show’s Joseph Siravo. A big shot in the mob, he spent much of Tony’s adolescence in prison, entrusting Dickie to look after the boy while he’s inside.Corrado “Junior” Soprano (Dominic Chianese, Corey Stoll)A perennial thorn in Tony’s side, Corrado Soprano, better known as Junior, is Johnny Boy’s brother, and partly helps raise Tony while Johnny Boy is serving time. In “The Sopranos,” Junior (Dominic Chianese) is conniving and always jockeying for power, and as portrayed by Corey Stoll in “Many Saints,” he is no less ruthless or power-hungry as a younger man, to no one’s surprise. His relationship with Tony has been strained ever since he doubted the young Soprano’s capacity to become a varsity athlete.“Hollywood” Dick Moltisanti (Ray Liotta)Dickie’s father, and Christopher’s grandfather, “Hollywood” Dick looms over “Many Saints” with a biting, portentous menace. Although he never appears and virtually never comes up in “The Sopranos,” his actions in the prequel set in motion many of the events that defined the series. Corey Stoll and Vera Farmiga in the film.Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand, Vera Farmiga)Tony’s mother, played in the series by Nancy Marchand, is one of the colossal psychic stressors that drive Tony into therapy, and in “Many Saints,” we see the long-suffering woman back when she still had the faintest glimmer of warmth. Vera Farmiga channels the younger version of the character with stunning accuracy.Silvio Dante (Steve Van Zandt, John Magaro)A fixture of the series, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) is one of Tony’s top lieutenants and most trusted advisers. “Many Saints” finds him played by John Magaro and working with similar diligence under Dickie, as well as taking a personal liking to the young Tony, who he observes has a great deal of potential. We get some long-awaited answers about the character’s natural hairline.Paulie Gualtieri (Tony Sirico, Billy Magnussen)Paulie Gualtieri, sometimes known as Paulie Walnuts, is a “Sopranos” fan favorite, beloved for his stylized Italian mannerisms and no-bull attitude. Like Silvio, Paulie is a faithful lieutenant of Tony’s on the series (where he’s played by Tony Sirico) and works closely with Dickie in “Many Saints” (when Billy Magnussen takes the role).Ray Liotta, left, Joey “CoCo” Diaz, Corey Stoll, Samson Moeakiola and Billy Magnussen in “Many Saints.”Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (Vincent Pastore, Samson Moeakiola)The colorfully nicknamed “Big Pussy” is another lieutenant in the New Jersey mafia who works for Dickie (Samson Moeakiola in the film) and later Tony (Vincent Pastore in the series). Although he has a small role in “Many Saints,” he goes on to be an important figure in Tony’s life, with his betrayal of the family forming the heart of the show’s second season.Janice Soprano (Aida Turturro, Mattea Conforti)Sister to Tony, and daughter to Johnny Boy and Livia, she’s resented by Tony as the family’s golden child, much spoiled and doted on. In the film, she’s played by Mattea Conforti, who grows up to be Aida Turturro in the series. More