James Gandolfini’s struggles during The Sopranos led to extreme behavior, including a disappearance that nearly convinced HBO he had died.
Though he had given a gazillion epic performances in numerous acting projects throughout his star-studded career, perfectly putting his acting chops out on display, perhaps none was as iconic as the late legendary James Gandolfini’s unparalleled portrayal of the Italian-American mafia head from New Jersey, Tony Soprano in The Sopranos.
But as perfection-at-its-peak as his onscreen performance has been deemed by many, his time offscreen on the sets of the show wasn’t all that kind to him. In fact, Gandolfini’s personal struggles were so extreme that the actor once almost convinced HBO that he had died during the shooting days of the smash-hit masterpiece after disappearing for days!
The time James Gandolfini convinced HBO about his death during The Sopranos
While his onscreen character was a tough-core mafia boss who only needed to vent to his therapist when he struggled to manage his family and criminal life affairs, James Gandolfini‘s offscreen time while working on The Sopranos was pretty much no different, except that he usually ended up disappearing from the shoots for a while to deal with his new-found un-hideable fame.
However, one time, this actually went to the extremes and almost convinced the execs at HBO that he had actually died. This happened one fine evening in New York City, when Gandolfini had to show up at Westchester County Airport at six p.m. to shoot the final appearance of the character Furio Giunta. And this particular shoot day wasn’t a normal one either.
This is because that particular shoot more than just involved filming scenes with a helicopter and even had them shutting down the entire airport for the same. But even when the actor didn’t show up that evening, very few panicked, and for reasons all too understandable.
In GQ correspondent Brett Martin’s new book Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Terence Winter, the writer-producer on set that night, detailed everyone’s reaction to the late actor’s sudden disappearance at first:
It was an annoyance, but it wasn’t cause for concern. You know, ‘It’s just money.’ I mean, it was a ton of money — we shut down a f—king airport. Nobody was particularly sad to go home at nine-thirty on a Friday night.
But while other times he used to return sooner, this time around, Gandolfini’s disappearance lasted more than twelve hours, making it clear that this time was different and the actor was pretty much just gone, leading to the halt of a massively-held operation until the actor felt it better to return.
James Gandolfini had passive-aggressive fits while working on The Sopranos
With the ever-increasing fame of The Sopranos, it didn’t take long for James Gandolfini to become a very famous personality either. And he, for one, couldn’t even escape it, no matter how hard he tried: He was six feet tall, upward of 250 pounds, and had no place to hide his massive frame, becoming one of the most recognizable men in the country.
All of this, of course, took a severe toll on the actor as his sudden refusal to show up to work became a semiregular occurrence, his fits being passive-aggressive. As detailed in the book, Gandolfini “would claim to be sick, refuse to leave his TriBeCa apartment, or simply not show up.” But these stints often led him to spend excessively to make up for it.
Apparently, after pulling off the disappearing moves, the actor would inevitably feel so wretched about his behavior and the tremendous logistic disruptions it had caused by the next day that he would end up treating the cast and crew to extravagant gifts. “All of a sudden there’d be a sushi chef at lunch,” one crew member recalled in the book. “Or we’d all get massages.”
But, in his defense, embodying the personality of his already mentally struggling character of Tony Soprano wasn’t an easy feat, not to mention James Gandolfini’s own incredibly dark personal struggles. That said, his getting the chance to disappear even for a little while from the show for the sake in exchange for a few extravagant gifts is only understandable.
