James Gandolfini was unknown to most TV viewers when he got the role of Tony Soprano. But if you were a connoisseur of character actors in the mid-’90s, he was already on your radar. 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.
