James Gandolfini Reprises Tony Soprano Role in Newly Found Footage
A long-rumored video of James Gandolfini reprising his Emmy-winning role of Tony Soprano has been unearthed.
The footage (below) has Gandolfini and his co-star Edie Falco back in their roles as The Sopranos power couple Tony and Carmela.
The clip was privately produced in 2010 — three years after the HBO drama’s finale — in an effort to lure LeBron James to the New York Knicks.
The scene takes place “Two Years Later,” following the end of the show. “Yeah, life’s good here Carm, even if we are in the witness protection program,” Tony says to his wife. Then, they discussed the possibility of James moving to New York and finding him the perfect home: Madison Square Garden. The video was obtained by former ESPN host Pablo Torre and aired on his Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. The scene starts at the 9:30-minute mark.
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The existence of the tape was publicly revealed three years ago in the docuseries podcast Shattered: Hope, Heartbreak and the New York Knicks.
Producer Rocco Caruso was enlisted to create the team’s video, which was shot in Gandolfini’s New York apartment. “They thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we could somehow start the piece with The Sopranos?’ because it had just more or less ended,” Caruso recalled at the time. “And I said, ‘I know Edie … I could send her an email,’ and she said ‘Great. I’ll do it.’”
Falco said she remembered the entire experience well “and what is absolutely amazing to me is I didn’t know who LeBron James was,” the actress previously said, laughing. “We got those requests all the time back then and Jim Gandolfini, he did nothing. And somehow he agreed to this thing, which I was shocked by. I thought it was a prank when someone said Jim’s going to do it. And there we were, dressed as our characters. And I was thinking, ‘This can’t possibly be happening.'”
Caruso said the idea that Tony was in witness protection was actually Gandolfini’s idea as a way to explain why he had a beard.
The Sopranos, of course, divisively concluded with an abrupt cut to black that many have interpreted as Tony being shot from behind while dining with his family. The 2021 Sopranos prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, co-written by series creator David Chase, seemed to nudge this direction as well, with — in a bit of potential foreshadowing — a young Tony hears about somebody being shot in the back and saying he wouldn’t want to die that way.
The full Knicks’ video pitch also includes appearances by Donald Trump, Richard Parsons, Reggie Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Rock, Earl Monroe, Mark Messier, Mike Bloomberg, Robert De Niro, Harvey Weinstein, Thelma Golden, Alec Baldwin, Spike Lee and several others.
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