‘Sopranos’ Creator David Chase Had Only One Qualm About James Gandolfini: ‘Is He Threatening Enough?’

James Gandolfini wasn’t well known when he landed the part of Tony Soprano on the HBO series “The Sopranos,” and the show’s creator David Chase wasn’t completely sold on the casting when the actor’s agent contacted him. After Chase watched the actor’s reel, he called back and asked, “I think he’s brilliant. I have one concern, and that is, Is he threatening enough?”

“David, if your only concern is is he threatening enough,” Nancy Sanders replied. “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 conversation was recorded in the new book “Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend,” an excerpt of which was shared by Vulture Friday. “In the movie version of The Sopranos, I thought about Robert De Niro,” Chase also explained. “There was never anyone after that, seriously, who I thought could be Tony Soprano.”

The search was tough. Chase deployed casting directors Georgianne Walken and Sheila Jaffe, who had previously worked on independent films. They’d worked with writer-director Melissa Painter before and when she also suggested Gandolfini, the pair began to investigate.

“We had only seen Jim Gandolfini play heavies, and this father was this hippie who was very different, but I thought he was a good actor,” said Jaffe. “I’d seen him in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ with Aida Turturro. I always thought he was really good, interesting, but I had never seen him do this kind of thing. But it was a lab and it was like, ‘Why not?’ He did it, and it was great.”

Gandolfini met with the show’s team and then with HBO, but didn’t think he’d get the part. He even stopped his own audition halfway through (“He was very good,” Chase said of the moment), and told the team, “I’m not doing this right. I didn’t prepare for this right. I’m not doing it right. And I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to come back and do it for you again.”

The actor made arrangements to come back the next Friday but then called and said his mother had died (in reality she had died months before the second audition date). “When he finally settled down and really did a reading, it was just obvious,” Chase said. “There was just not any question about it. He was the guy. It was audition after audition — a lot of people went up for that role. As a matter of fact, they don’t like you to bring in one person — they want to have some input. So three people were brought to HBO for the role of Tony, and Jim was one of them.”

Eventually, Gandolfini won the part and made television history.

Read the excerpt at Vulture.

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