“Who told you it is your character?”: The Sopranos Creator David Chase Rudely Shut Down Cast Complaints Despite Their Commitment To The Series
The Sopranos, created by David Chase, aired for six seasons with eighty-six episodes. The show is well renowned for having aided the stars of the Second Golden Age of Television and is considered one of the greatest and most influential shows of all time.
The story followed Tony Soprano, an Italian-American mobster from New Jersey who demonstrates his struggles to manage both his leadership role in a criminal organization and his personal life. It has been known that the show’s creator had a clear vision for the characters and did not entertain actors’ inputs. The series is regarded as one of the greatest shows ever.
David Chase revealed James Gandolfini called The Sopranos’ writers ‘vampires’
During his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live via Uproxx, while promoting his new project The Many Saints of Newark, creator David Chase shared that James Gandolfini, who played the character of Tony Soprano on the show, would call the writers of the show vampires. He said,
“He called all the writers ‘vampires,’ because we would steal from the actors’ real lives. We never stole anything from him, but we stole a lot from Tony Sirico.”
Other than taking inspiration from actors’ lives, the creator has mentioned that The Sopranos, in a way, serves as an autobiography for him, as the relationship between Tony and his mother was based on Chase and his mother.
David Chase didn’t listen to the actors’ complaints about the characters
According to a quote on IMDB, the creator, who based the show loosely on his own life, did notcreated by David Chasecreated by David Chase listen to the complaints of the actors about their characters. The quote explains that whenever someone would walk up to David Chase to argue or to have a conversation that their character would not do this or that thing, the creator would simply reply with
“Who told you it is your character?”
On the Talking Sopranos podcast, David Chase mentioned that the actors would not be pleased to learn about their character’s fate on the show, even though he tried to be as gentle as he could and they would get it by Al Sapienza, who played Mikey Palmice on the show.
Chase said,
“It never stopped. It was funny because he kept coming up with ideas and things [to keep Palmice alive]. I said, ‘Yeah, Al, just stop. You gotta go’”.
Al Sapienza’s Mikey Palmice appeared for the last time in the season one finale of the show.
David Chase went against HBO’s request to change a scene on The Sopranos
According to CBC, the creator of the show thought of each episode of The Sopranos as a tiny movie rather than a soap opera, and decided to incorporate a murder in S1E5 of the show where Tony would kill and strangle a guy with his bare hands at a gas station.
The guy was supposed to be the one who entered the witness relocation program after turning state evidence against Tony’s family and Chase saw this scene as a very significant character development for Tony. But HBO’s CEO had begged Chase not to film the scene since he believed that the murder would set the audience off.
Chase went against HBO’s request and filmed the scene as it was the first time Tony Soprano had killed someone in the series and that episode has been cited as one of the best episodes in the history of television series.
