SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
James Gandolfini played Tony Soprano in the HBO series for six seasons, ending in 2007. And "The Sopranos" was considered an instant classic. The New Jersey mob family, headed by a boss who had to fret about rival mobs, FBI stings, as well as his own family, all while dealing with growing older and his crime family scrambling to survive. He tried to work through some of that with his therapist, played by Lorraine Bracco.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SOPRANOS")
JAMES GANDOLFINI: (As Tony Soprano) You know where I was yesterday when you called?
LORRAINE BRACCO: (As Jennifer Melfi) I don't know.
GANDOLFINI: (As Tony Soprano) I was outside a [expletive] house while a guy that works for me was inside beating the [expletive] out of a guy that owes me money. Broke his arm. Put a bullet in his kneecap.
BRACCO: (As Jennifer Melfi) How'd that make you feel?
GANDOLFINI: (As Tony Soprano) Wished it was me in there.
SIMON: James Gandolfini, who was acclaimed as the Marlon Brando of television, at times struggled with that tough-guy persona and the glare of celebrity. He died in 2013 at the age of 51.
Jason Bailey, the film critic and historian, has written a new book, "Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, And The Life Of A Legend." He joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
JASON BAILEY: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.
SIMON: What made you say to yourself, this was a life and talent that needs their story to be told?
BAILEY: I felt like he was such an enormous talent. He was an actor of such tremendous skill but was also an actor of incredible range, which I don't think people talk about as much. You know, Tony Soprano and "The Sopranos" had such an outsized influence and sort of cast such a giant shadow over television and over popular culture in general that Tony Soprano is what everyone thinks of when they think of James Gandolfini. And I understand why that is. But I felt like his story was one of - first of all, of a working-class actor who considered himself a character actor and aimed only to be that and was sort of - became an unlikely star, which I think is always of interest to people, who struggled after that show ended to continue to grow as an artist in spite of sort of the box that that show put him in, which I think is fascinating. And more than anything, I just - I would hear these stories, mostly after his passing, from friends, from colleagues of his tremendous character, of his personal generosity and kindness. And I certainly was fascinated by the sort of incongruity between that and the persona of his most famous character.
SIMON: He really was a Jersey guy, wasn't he?
BAILEY: Yeah, he was - not far at all removed from his Italian roots. Very much a working-class background. You know, his father was a bricklayer when he was younger, and I think that background is really important to understanding who he was as an actor and who he was as a person.
SIMON: He was a part-time bartender and a student at Rutgers. And his girlfriend...
BAILEY: Yeah.
SIMON: ...Lynn Marie Jacobson died in a car crash. Do you think this kind of changed direction in his life?
BAILEY: It did. He talked about it only on a couple of occasions, but one of them was one of his Emmy acceptance speeches. He thanked her. He dedicated the award to her and said, she made me want to be an actor. And what he meant by that was, you know, he had tinkered with acting on stage as a high school student and loved it. But, you know, he was a working-class guy, and the arts is not something you go into. And when he went to Rutgers, he didn't take advantage of their wonderful theater program. He studied, you know, communications and journalism so he could get, like, a real job. And I think losing someone he cared for so deeply really sort of reconfigured his priorities in terms of the kind of life he wanted to live and realizing that he did want to be an artist and that it was OK to pursue that.
SIMON: He got some early notices, especially in a production with Alec Baldwin of "A Streetcar Named Desire," but he was not a marquee name when he auditioned for the role of Tony Soprano, was he?
BAILEY: He was not. He had carved out a very nice space for himself as a character actor in the 1990s, you know, starting with Tony Scott's "True Romance." You know, it's a small role, but he has one incredibly memorable scene, and it's kind of a big monologue as a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. And so throughout the '90s, he would pop up in small but memorable supporting roles. And I think that's the kind of actor that he saw himself as.
SIMON: What do you think he came to see in Tony Soprano?
BAILEY: I think Tony's vulnerability is a huge piece of why that character was one that he could relate to. A lot of the tough guys that he had played up until then had been sort of one-dimensional stereotypes, basically, which was what he was trying to avoid. But what made Tony Soprano compelling to him as an actor was the same thing that made him compelling to us as an audience, which was that he had all of these multitudes, that he had sensitivity, vulnerability, weakness. And also, I think part of the reason why we found his performance so compelling was a lot of those same contradictions existed within him.
SIMON: There came a time when he held out for a pay raise after the show became a success.
BAILEY: Yes.
SIMON: But it was extraordinary how he spread it around.
BAILEY: It became sort of the talk of the tabloids at the time. And the thing you have to understand about "The Sopranos," especially for, you know, East Coast media, was that at its height, there was no story about "The Sopranos" that was too small for coverage. He felt that the kind of money that other actors were getting on network shows for, frankly, a lot less work than he was doing - those salaries had grown so large at that time. He was generating so much money for HBO. So he and his team saw that he was in kind of a power position and renegotiated and got a nice salary bump. And then when he went back to set, he called each of the supporting players for the show into his trailer one by one, handed them each a check for $36,000 and said, thanks for standing by me.
SIMON: What was happening when there came a time when James Gandolfini didn't show up for work?
BAILEY: The thing you have to understand about him and this show was that this was a level of fame that he had never wanted, had never anticipated. It was sort of a public pressure that he was not prepared for. And there got to be some days where he just didn't come to work. He would often warn people. He would say, I'm not coming in tomorrow. I spoke to a lot of the cast and crew about this. There isn't really a consensus because there would be different reasons. Sometimes it was just all of the work had gotten him. Sometimes there was a really difficult scene that he didn't feel like he was ready for. Sometimes he just had been out all weekend and it was Monday morning, and he'd had a heavy weekend, and he just couldn't make it in.
He also was wrestling with what nearly every person I talked to classified as demons - you know, that there were demons of addiction. There were demons of self-doubt and of sort of succumbing to that pressure. And that was his coping mechanism. But what's fascinating about any of the sort of issues that you hear about is that they would all tell me those things, but not one of them would bad-mouth him in any way.
SIMON: You venture to guess what James Gandolfini would think about your book if he were still with us today.
BAILEY: This was something I was told by Robert Iler, who played Anthony Jr. on the show - that, you know, one of the constants throughout all of the interviews, everyone who knew him, was that Jim couldn't take a compliment. And so Mr. Iler believes that Mr. Gandolfini would actually not care for the book at all because he would get...
SIMON: (Laughter).
BAILEY: ...Very tired of people saying nice things about him in print, that he would find it quite tiresome. And you know what? That's a criticism that I'll respect.
SIMON: Jason Bailey, his new book "Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, And The Life Of A Legend." Thanks so much for being with us.
BAILEY: Thank you again for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOE MCBRIDE SONG, "WOKE UP THIS MORNING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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