David Chase wasn’t initially sold on James Gandolfini playing Tony Soprano in The Sopranos because he thought he wasn’t “threatening enough.”
In an excerpt from Jason Bailey’s new book Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend, Bailey recounted the casting process for the coveted part. After reading the script for the HBO pilot, Nancy Sanders, one of his Gandolfini’s managers, knew he was perfect for the role.
“I went, ‘Oh my God, I think I have Tony Soprano,’” she remembered in the excerpt published by Vulture. While the show’s creator thought Gandolfini was “brilliant,” he told Sanders he had one doubt in casting him for the part: “I have one concern, and that is, is he threatening enough?”
The manager was taken aback by his concern and assured him that Gandolfini was surely “threatening enough” to play the mafia mobster.
“David, if your only concern is is he threatening enough,” she began. “If you said to me, ‘He’s a little chubby,’ or ‘He’s losing his hair,’ I could understand. But he’s threatening enough. This is your guy.”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to reps for Chase and HBO for comment.
However, Gandolfini also wasn’t sure he would land the role and thought that Chase was “going to be a pain in the ass” to work with. “I think my exact words were, ‘I could kick this guy right in the ass, but I’ll never get cast,’” he recalled via the novel’s excerpt. “‘They’ll hire some fucking pretty boy.’ I thought they’d hire, you know, one of these Irish-looking guys who are all over TV now.”
Chase knew Gandolfini was the perfect choice “when he finally settled down and really did a reading, it was just obvious.” Chase recalled, “There was just not any question about it. He was the guy.”
Still, they continued to cycle through actors to ensure they had the right Tony Soprano picked out. Ultimately, three people were up for the role — Gandolfini, The Alto Knights star Mike Rispoli and Steven Van Zandt, who later took on the part of Silvio Dante in The Sopranos.
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