Drea de Matteo took part in the new HBO documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos, but that doesn’t mean she’s happy with how it turned out.
De Matteo, 52, took issue with how the film portrayed her late Sopranos costar James Gandolfini, saying that it made the late actor look like “a beast.”
“When I saw the film at Tribeca and I saw the part about James Gandolfini, I was appalled. I really was disgusted,” she exclusively told Us Weekly while promoting the relaunch of her apparel line, ULTRAFREE. “Why pick the lowest hanging fruit on Jim’s character and take that and run with it, and flatten him out to a one dimensional character that is not much different from Tony Soprano, when that’s not who he was.”
De Matteo played Adriana La Cerva, girlfriend of Tony Soprano’s nephew, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), on the hit HBO series. She appeared in the first five seasons from 1999 to 2004, and remembered Gandolifini as “a fantastic actor who would never, ever do anything less than completely go where he needed to go to play that character.”
Gandolfini died of a heart attack in 2013, six years after The Sopranos concluded. De Matteo saw how he was portrayed in the documentary as another way for HBO to profit off the late actor’s work.
“[They] painted him out to be kind of a beast, and I find that disgraceful,” she continued. “They took the actor that made that network millions and millions of dollars, changed the face of television, and sensationalized him to make another f–ing dollar off of him.”
The documentary delved into Gandolfini’s mental and emotional struggles throughout the series, touching on his substance abuse and his habit of “quitting” the show or not showing up to work, only to be convinced to return.
Edie Falco, who played Gandolfini’s on-screen wife, Carmela Soprano, speculated in Wise Guy that the Emmy-winning actor may have ended up “taking [his] work home” with him. Show creator David Chase shared a similar sentiment, comparing Gandolfini to the character he played.
“He was really a good guy and really complicated,” Chase said. “You might say, and I’m not sure about this, maybe there was more Tony there than he wanted to admit. That it was too easy for him.”
De Matteo doesn’t remember it quite the same way. She told Us about Gandolfini’s commitment to his character and the show, adding that it’s not fair to criticize him now, 11 years after his death.
“He’s not here to speak for himself and we all are,” she said. “And we can all tell you that we all partied like crazy, but no one had the respect he had to be there every single day and give a top-notch performance that will rattle America. And it was such a disservice, I thought, and so disrespectful.”
Us Weekly has reached out to HBO for comment.
Like her character, de Matteo is unafraid to speak her mind. It’s reflected in the messages she promotes through ULTRAFREE, which she says is about “trying to make freedom cool again” at a time where much of America is split along ideological lines.
“The whole concept of freedom lately has sort of been pushed over to the right of politics when it was always on the left,” she said “We need to get back together and be in the middle and hold hands and huddle down and remember that this whole political mess, it really just starts with us.”
Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is available now on HBO and Max.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi