The shadow of Tony Soprano looms large. A quarter-century after the burly family/Family man changed the face of television forever, the spectre of the iconic antihero can be found everywhere on screens both small and large. But what about the man behind the boss?
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In his deeply researched and culturally insightful new biography Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend (Abrams Press), New York film critic and historian Jason Bailey traces the life of the gone-too-soon star who was so much more than his 86-episode HBO phenomenon. Ahead of the book’s release this month, Bailey spoke with The Globe and Mail about Jersey’s proudest son.
Did you come to the project first as an admirer of The Sopranos, or Gandolfini himself?
The latter. At the risk of sounding like the hipster who knew your favourite band before you did, I came to him through True Romance. God, when that movie came out in 1993, I was fully in the tank for Quentin Tarantino, who wrote it. I was 17 years old, wanted to be a filmmaker, working in a video store. But after I saw it, I didn’t want to talk about Christian Slater or Christopher Walken or Brad Pitt or any of the other big actors in it, but just this big guy who made such a big impression in a relatively small role. I kept seeing him pop up across the ’90s, in Crimson Tide, Get Shorty. So when HBO started running ads for this new show, my roommate was like, “Wow, this gangster show looks cool.” But to me, it was more, “I can’t wait for this James Gandolfini show.”
It feels like a daunting assignment, given how much Sopranos-related books and media are already out there. Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Sopranos Sessions, Brett Martin’s Difficult Men, two separate HBO oral histories, Alex Gibney’s documentary from last year, and so many podcasts.
Very much, and I went into this hyper-aware of all that and saying very clearly to my editor, this will not be a Sopranos book. Obviously the show is going to loom very large over it, and I was somewhat intimidated by how many great Sopranos books are already out there. And I’m not going to say anything more definitive about the show than what’s in The Sopranos Sessions. So what I tried to do was dig into the production as best as I could, but approach it primarily through the lens of Jim’s acting. To a large extent, this is a book about performing.
You uncover some great remembrances from Susan Aston, who was essentially his acting coach. Was she one of the first people you connected with?
Author, film critic and historian Jason Bailey.Supplied
She was the very first interview that I did. It became very clear as I was starting my research how important her input would be. We had a two-hour-plus conversation, and she drew the road map for me in terms of understanding who Jim was, both as a person and as an actor. She knew him so intimately on both levels, which was so rare. He had friends and family who he was very close to, and close collaborators. But he compartmentalized his life so that few people knew both halves of him.
You were able to conduct dozens of new interviews with such collaborators as Edie Falco, Steven Van Zandt, Robert Iler, Lorraine Bracco, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss. Was there one source who unlocked a door for you in terms of access?
I have to give all credit to Vanity Fair on that. Before this I had been working on a book, a biography of John Candy, that as I was researching, it became clear that access to those in his life was going to be next to impossible – there was already another book in the works, and then a documentary that Colin Hanks was directing. But I had noticed that the 10th anniversary of Jim’s passing in 2013 was coming up, and I pitched Vanity Fair on a remembrance. So that publication opens up a lot of doors for you. It was extremely stressful, but it ultimately came together.
You have a tricky job in the book in terms of balance: examining his on-screen work, but also exploring the darker elements of his personal life, which everyone seemed extremely reluctant to talk about.
The biggest challenge was figuring out how to talk about the addictions, the demons as everyone called them. His on-set absenteeism. I come from the world of online entertainment journalism, click-bait factories and aggregators, and I know that this material can be plucked out of a book and become sensationalized. So the question for me becomes how I can approach it with respect and sensitivity. It was vitally important to not exploit or frankly judge him for these transgressions. And candidly, that was important for me not just as a journalist but as someone who is also the son of an addict and has substance-abuse issues running down all sides of my family.
On that note, you neatly bookend the biography by examining how the New York tabloids exploited Gandolfini’s personal life, and wanted to have it both ways: castigate the star while using the success of his work to fuel non-stop coverage.
That became weirdly important for me, because as I mention early on in the book, the family very kindly and patiently declined to participate. But as I was reading through every newspaper clipping I could get my hands on, I came out of that process thinking, well yeah, it’s no surprise the family doesn’t want to talk to a journalist. This man was so grotesquely mishandled by the media when he was alive. The more I read through all the articles, I felt that Jim was someone who was mistreated by tabloid culture in much the same way as Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. He was typecast as a dumb thug who was made fun of for his physical attributes and mercilessly robbed of his privacy when he was going through real trials and tribulations.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
