The Sopranos actor Edie Falco has said that she had to stop rewatching the iconic show because it was “too shocking” to her.
Falco played Carmela Soprano, wife to James Gandolfini’s Tony, throughout the show’s six seasons.
The show wrapped in 2007, and Gandolfini passed away in 2013 at the age of 51 from a heart attack.
Falco admitted that she had begun to rewatch the show recently with her friend Aida Turturro, who played Janice Soprano on the show, but couldn’t make it past the fourth episode.
“Aida and I watched a few episodes and I said, ‘This is killing me,’” she says told The Irish Times. “It was too fraught, and a big part of that is Jim. People die and you move on, then you see them on screen, and it is too shocking.”
She went to say that whereas she “adored Jimmy,” they didn’t spend much time together off set: “So when I looked in his face he wasn’t Jim, he was Tony.”
Falco also divulged some behind-the-scenes details about shooting with Gandolfini, including his tendency to eat in-between takes.
“We learned tricks so it looked like we were eating, but we weren’t. But Jim [James Gandolfini] ate in every frigging take, and he ate between takes,” she said.
“There was one scene we were shooting where he was eating a bowl of ice-cream, and in every take he ate and would then refill the bowl, and then at one point I realised he’s not really listening to me – he had gone into a sugar coma!”
She concluded that they had to stop shooting the scene and come back to it another day.
“He was like a five-year-old: ‘The ice-cream is good. I like it!’ I was, like, ‘You gotta stop, you’re gonna get sick!’”