He was always referring to himself as a “guy like me,” in a baffled sort of way, like how the fuck did a guy like me pull this whole thing off? And part of what James Gandolfini meant was the son of the bricklayer and the lunch lady, this King Konging ex-jock with a neck like a paint can, a guy from New Jersey, where they were not what you might call beautiful but were magnificent. They were loud and tough and hugging and kissing; they were mowing the lawn shirtless in sandals and black dress socks, like his father did. They were having operatic conversations with their mothers. They were a little rude and they were breaking shit just for the hell of it, like the night at college Gandolfini broke the automatic arm in the parking garage just by ramming his whole body into it, no reason; that’s showtime, baby. 

A guy who never had any precious fantasies about Hollywood, with all its hee-hawing galas and decadence and spiritual rot. A guy who wouldn’t really indulge you, who had no patience, who was bored by all this shit and seemed to find all that labrador enthusiasm for some excruciating Jimmy Fallon sketch to be so humiliating. A guy who, when Harvey Weinstein tried to book him on Letterman to promote Killing Them Softly, said no way, no chance, and when Harvey kept calling him, calling him on set during the filming of something else even, he said to everyone in his trailer, “I will beat the fuck out of Harvey Weinstein. He fucking calls me again, I will beat the fuck out of him.” 

Most interviews he treated not like discussions on craft, but like telemarketers calling your house. The media was there either to pick the bones for gossip or jerk you off, and all of that was ridiculous to him. You want to know about my process? My dreams? My ex-wives? Where I find all this rage? 

Asked once about his favorite curse word he said, “It’s a Jersey one. ‘Fuckin’ douchebag.’” Asked “What sound or noise do you love?” he said, “Someone who’s close to me belching.” 

And you’d have to say, too, that what he meant was a guy who looked like this, moved like this, who was only about six feet flat but hunched in a way that made him seem so much bigger, like he’d been stuffed into a dollhouse somehow. He didn’t have Hollywood’s rigid posture or its Turkish hairlines or all its expensive teeth. He’d been bald for as long as we’d known him; he had a dent in his forehead from when a friend kicked a door open while Gandolfini was waiting to prank him on the other side. He had a shine, he loomed, he plodded. When James Lipton asked him how important Tony Soprano’s weight was to the performance Gandolfini said, with real affection, like it was a separate person altogether and a very dear friend of his, that it made the character. He said that between seasons when he might slim down he didn’t feel right, he didn’t feel like Tony and he didn’t feel like himself, he didn’t have the lumber, he didn’t have all this, and when he said that on stage with Lipton he kind of held his chest and his belly tight to him, like the way someone on a subway holds all their belongings to them, their belongings, this whole behemoth was what belonged to him. A guy like that.

A couple years after Gandolfini finishes high school he’s dating a girl, they’re 19, she’s working two jobs and he’s studying advertising at Rutgers. But late one night something happens, she’s in a terrible car crash and there’s nothing anyone can do, and the one time he ever talks about it he said he was never the same, like some fuse had been blown for good. “The same” in the sense of like, savor every moment? That sort of thing? “No,” he said. “If anything, it was, ‘Why plan for the future? Fuck it.’ It was like ‘Fuck this.’” 

In his early 20s he works every kind of night job. Waiter; bartender; nightclub manager; delivery truck driver; bouncer, breaking up fights just for the action, picking up the tones and volumes and the greedy struts of all those guys waiting in line to get in. He’s getting hammered and fucking the waitresses, sleeping into the afternoon, month to month and living lean, no plans besides not having one. 

“I have a system down. I throw everything in plastic garbage bags and can be situated in my new place in minutes. Without my name on a lease, I’m in and out. I have no responsibilities.” He says that in 1988, in a New York Times piece about squatters in Manhattan.

But when he’s 25 a guy he knows from the night-club is taking an acting class and tells him to come along. “I had such anger back then,” he says. “I guess when you’re young everybody does, you’re pissed and you’re not sure why. You want to express something but you don’t know what it is. And [the teacher] told a partner to do something to me, and I destroyed the place, all the crap they have on stage, I remember my hands were bleeding.”

Watch him in this from the very beginning, 1989, moving across the screen in a way that is both charismatic and a little predatory and dirty. He plays an Elvis impersonator in an off-Broadway play about a woman who’s infatuated with the real Elvis. He’s not bouncing anymore but he’s laying bricks during the day, doing some carpentry, delivering seltzer for a company owned by Hasidic Jews. He does Streetcar Named Desire in ’92, not as the lead but as Brando’s slovenly poker buddy who lives upstairs, who drinks too much and is rough with his wife. He gets cast in a production of On The Waterfront, again not as Brando but as Brando’s brother, the Rod Steiger part, pressed into a dull shape by the syndicate bosses and so many compromises, pleading with Brando to take one more bad deal. The play never gets off the ground, something about Gandolfini putting his hand through a glass window during a rehearsal take; he’s fired a week later. “I had a lovely discussion with one of the producers,” he said. “Then I got a call telling me I was fired for being too mouthy.”  

But word’s starting to get around about this guy. He does a two-person play in a Village basement and the neighborhood is talking about it. Tony Scott’s making a movie from a Tarantino script about two giddy newlyweds, the suitcase of cocaine they steal, and the gang of hitmen that comes looking for them. Tom Sizemore is cast as one of the hitmen, but he can’t bring himself to do a scene where he’s got to beat the shit out of Patricia Arquette, so he says to Scott, I’ve got another guy for you. “I knew Jimmy from the theater,” said Sizemore. There’s just one scene but what a horrible, twisted masterpiece it is, eight minutes long, takes five days to film but there he is, this bully with a flirtatious glint in his eye, this mix of menace and tenderness. He says years later that he built the whole character with little gestures and scraps of story he’d taken from A Guy In The Neighborhood he knew when he was younger, and when Lipton asks Gandolfini about the guy he can’t get into it.

And now he’s in so many of those forgettable ’90s dramas, because he has one of those faces and vulgar accents that really get the point across. He has a way of making every scene and set feel so defiled by the time he’s left it, threatened and bent to its limit. He fits the crazy kid and the ornery old man into the same role, sometimes into the same scene. In 1997 he’s one of the jurors in William Friedkin’s remake of 12 Angry Men, a housepainter, and where Lumet’s original Juror No. 6 was a weary fatherly type, Gandolfini treats the trial like school detention, steaming around with teenage disobedience. He washes his whole bald head in the sink of the courthouse bathroom in a mad frenzy; he takes a wad gum out of his mouth and sticks it on a legal pad; Jack Lemmon poses a hypothetical to him and he slams a door in his face. 

A year later he’s the whistleblower in A Civil Action, a factory worker whose neighbors are dying of leukemia because the company has been dumping poisonous chemicals into the water. And when the lawyer comes around asking Gandolfini to reconsider, with his dainty hairdo and his scarf, a lecture about “random variables,” and how can anyone really know for sure if it was our poison or just your bad luck, Gandolfini stands there in the cold with his hands in his pockets, ready to blow. And then, almost, something like a smile starts to crack out from all that rock, like can you believe the balls on this fucking guy? Can you believe all these fucking guys, the whole world trying to get one over on us? 

Gandolfini: “My father always said a million times, ‘We’re peasants.’ His concept of life was, ‘No one’s better than anybody else.’ And, ‘The rich are thieves.” 

And it’s around that time that the peasant reads the pilot script for The Sopranos. He says, “I think my exact words were, ‘I could kick this guy right in the ass, but I’ll never get cast. They’ll hire some fucking pretty boy.’” But this was not a show about the pretty boys, it was a show about the secretly tormented brutes of the Tri-state area, where even the made men lived in agony, hiring escorts and seeming to regard them in their house the way you would a cleaning lady, here to tend to one more mess of theirs. This was not about the solemn, priestly men of The Godfather or even all that mania of Scorsese gangsters, this was about your stunted ambitions, your paranoid crusades to nowhere, about the way modern living was trampling you under its feet, and in this way it was his kind of guy indeed. 

“It’s a man in struggle,” he says in 2004. “He doesn’t have a religion, he doesn’t believe in the government, he doesn’t believe in anything. He has nothing left, he’s got nothing left—it’s that searching that I think a lot of America does a lot of the time. He had no center left, and I really identified with that.”

It’s all here. The psychopath and the hump who hates his job and the little boy climbing out of the barnacle-covered submarine of adulthood, feeling the sun on his face for the first time in months. And now he’s going at it with Carm, boxing holes in the sheetrock. He’s in Uncle Junior’s house, asking him what he meant by all that varsity athlete talk, they’re watching a show about prairie dogs, sitting in silence as the dementia slowly washes Uncle Junior away from shore. And Tony says, with all this fragile hope in the voice suddenly, “I mean, don’t you love me?”

There are scenes when he hauls the whole bathrobed wreck of himself into a room with those sad bloodshot eyes, and you wonder how Gandolfini is ever going to make it out alive. Scenes where preparing to get up off the couch seems to bring him something like dread! You mean I’ve got to carry all of me all the way up there? All the time he’s having to invent new and fucked-up ways to provoke the nerves, to stay angry, pulling all-nighters, chugging a pot of coffee, walking the set with rocks in his shoes, punching the side of a Chevy Suburban between takes until the world feels almost like an adversary again. 

“But there are some days when you get to work and you’re not angry enough, and you have to kind of get angrier, and that’s a little . . . When I was younger, it was much more accessible.” 

He’s always talking about quitting, not threaten producers for a fatter paycheck, quit like I can’t do this anymore, like I don’t know how much further Fuck it can take me as a guiding philosophy, and when you’re young all your rivalries and lusts sit so present in the mind, they catapult you through every room in your life, you’re sleeping like a guerrilla on the lam and nothing ever matters. But you get tired, balder, a son, divorce, married again, a daughter, all those years lugging yourself around has ruined your knees, and in the reports after the heart attack that kills you they will mention what a beating you’ve taken, along with all the rum you “guzzled” and the orders of fried shrimp, which they note weren’t for the table but your “own dinner,” like no one else could have any of the bear’s big buffet, imagine that? 

But anyway they’re paying you so much money now you can’t believe it, so much money when you find out about how big the raise is you cut a check for everyone on the cast and crew because it feels so gluttonous to have that much. 

The early call times are killing him; there’s a hangover tearing up his head. The work is always so much and he’s disgusted by what a mess it’s making of his life, and when they call this “the cost of brilliance” he almost can’t believe that you’d let him off the hook, like here finally he’d become the guy getting one over on everyone else. He’s drinking more, not just some rowdy nights but something closer to gone, way out there, disappearing for longer and longer. He’s into rehab in private and out and back again, disappearing from set and no one can find him, showing up three days later at a beauty salon and asking to use their phone to call for a ride, making on-the-record confessions to clear the air because the Enquirer has gotten hold of his divorce files. 

“They made him seem like some junkie!” said Steve Schirripa a few years ago. “I didn’t like that. He was an actor! That had a problem, you know; not always, not always.”

There’s a picture of him I’ve been thinking about. It’s Halloween night, years ago, he’s going trick-or-treating around Manhattan with his son, Michael. Michael is some kind of ghost; Gandolfini is wearing a big rubber Homer Simpson mask. But in the picture he’s taken the mask off, he’s peering into Michael’s pillowcase of candy, almost like he was trying to get a better look, like whaddya got, like let me see that whole jackpot in there. Maybe you remember what happens next. There had been some paparazzi following them all night, block to block, and the guy is crossing the street to get even closer, and Gandolfini is coming down the sidewalk toward him now, the crowd is shouting “Jim don’t,” the paparazzi is saying “relax man, relax,” and Gandolfini is smacking the camera out of his hand, it’s still rolling and recording the ground, and all you can really make out is the sound of a voice huffing out “I don’t want to fucking relax.” 

And here was something like his genius; not the violence, which seemed to come to him like batting practice, but the command of his rage, how much mean was in there waiting, all the awful shapes it could twist the face into, and yet still how small and curious was the boy. Look at the photo. How much candy had you put in your bag? All of it was on that sidewalk, the factory worker and the prairie dogs. Where did you go to find all that? How did you hold all those things so steady in the heart? 

John Saward is a writer living in Chicago. You can follow him on Bluesky.

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