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“Is He Threatening Enough?”
The role of Tony Soprano came down to three actors. Inside an HBO conference room, Sopranos creator David Chase needed convincing.
Gandolfini had made a powerful impression in multiple big-screen supporting roles, including the intimidating Lt. Bobby Dougherty in submarine thriller Crimson Tide; a detective briefly possessed by a demon in Fallen; Geena Davis’s sweet boyfriend in Angie; a burly henchman named Bear who gets beaten up by John Travolta in Get Shorty; and, most spectacularly, the mob goon who fights Patricia Arquette to the death — and loses — in True Romance. When Gandolfini showed up in the waiting room of Dr. Melfi’s office in the pilot episode of The Sopranos, staring silently up at a statue of a naked woman, it was clear he’d found the role that would engage all his talents, plus more he hadn’t yet tapped into. Nancy Sanders remembers sitting with Jim and his agent, David Brownstein, in the Century Plaza Hotel restaurant near HBO’s headquarters, pressing him to sign the contract and dealing with an 11th-hour bout of second-guessing.
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