Drea de Matteo doesn’t like red carpets or hanging out with other celebrities.
The “Sopranos” star, 52, told Fox News Digital that leaving the industry “wasn’t a big deal,” because she never really felt like she belonged in Hollywood in the first place.
“You know, a lot of people ask me about being let go or being kicked out of Hollywood or being shunned. That never happened to me,” she explained. “I wasn’t there in the first place. I was never a Hollywood actress. I did a few roles on a few TV shows. I did well. I even had, you know, some achievement awards and stuff like that. But like, I was never really in the industry.”
“I don’t have fancy purses and stuff like that or walk red carpets. I don’t hang out with celebrities. I don’t, that’s not my world. So it’s not a big deal for me to leave the industry.”
Matteo is now focusing on her new jewelry collection, part of her ULTRAFREE clothing line, joking that the tombstones in her new Tombstone line have nameplates attached to them “in case you forget who you are, just look down there.”
She says that amulets can also be added to them.
“I mean, a lot of people do nameplates, but ours have little protective symbols,” she explains. “You can put a cross, a gun.”
“I don’t own fancy purses and stuff like that or walk red carpets. I don’t hang out with celebrities. I don’t, that’s not my world. So it’s not a big deal for me to be away from that.”
“The funny thing about it now is I always wear a pistol, a tiny pistol with a pearl handle,” she said. “People will give me all the time, A, because my ex’s name was Shooter, and B, because I was on ‘The Sopranos,’ and I always wear a bullet hanging from my earring.”
She continued, “For me, it’s more than that, it’s a symbol. It could be a cross, it could be a Star of David, but it could also be the Hamsa. It could be any symbol, any religious symbol. But guns are fun. Like Guns N Roses is a great name for a band, like Velvet Revolver, like the Sex Pistols. But, you know, nowadays, everyone’s clutching their pearls, what are you clutching at instead? ‘Protect your mind, protect your soul, protect your integrity, protect your independence.'” “We were supposed to be really stoned on the couch, so we smoked weed, and that was the biggest mistake we ever made,” she admitted. “We didn’t — we didn’t even know how to blend into the room around all these actors, all these extras. We went crazy.”
She said the makeup team “squirted red dye in our eyes like eyeliner, and we were like, ‘We’re so high, we don’t need this anymore.'” She said that “some people knew” that they were actually high, “but we were supposed to be high and act completely stupid.”
De Matteo also revealed how disappointed she was with the portrayal of late “Sopranos” star James Gandolfini in the new documentary about the show “Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos,” which she appeared in.
She said she felt the filmmakers “had the opportunity to write [Gandolfini] a love song. Why not? He was the hero of the network. He did more great things than the mistakes they needed to highlight.”
“He’s a hard worker,” she continued. “Does he blow off steam? Absolutely. I think we all know how to blow off steam. But to capitalize on that, to tell a story about ‘The Sopranos,’ to make him look like Tony Soprano, this man doesn’t look like Tony Soprano at all. Not at all. And, you know, because he’s an incredible actor, he lives in that space.”
