He said Fuggedaboudit.
“The Sopranos” creator David Chase has confirmed rumors that James Gandolfini was “missing” from the set while filming the hit crime drama.
Chase addressed the reports in an interview with the Guardian published on Friday and opened up about his working relationship with the late Tony Soprano actor.
“Fortunately, I wasn’t the one dealing with his disappearance,” he explained. “It was our line manager Eileen Landreth. She found him a place and did everything she had to do.”
But the 80-year-old Emmy winner also admitted that Gandolfini wasn’t always happy filming “The Sopranos,” which aired on HBO for six seasons from 1999 to 2007.
“I mean, he’s asked to meet me a few times, once on the Hudson River when he didn’t want to go to work and he looked really unhappy,” Chase told the outlet.
He added: “Three or four times this happened and we kept talking and talking, but there was never a time where I had to look for his whereabouts.”
Reports of Gandolfini going missing from the “Sopranos” set first surfaced in James Bailey’s 2025 biography of the late actor, “Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend.”
The show’s cinematographer, Phil Abraham, told Bailey that Gandolfini’s absences became such a problem that the network began fining Gandolfini hundreds of thousands of dollars each time he did not show up for work.
“I can’t say I’ve ever been on a show where something like that happened, but this was kind of a different beast,” Abraham explained.
“At one point, HBO was fining him 250 grand a day,” the cinematographer added. “And he said, ‘Fuck you. I can’t go to work.'” So that’s when we learned that it wasn’t just that he was giving a lot of blowjobs and drinking, and that he wasn’t just not waking up because he didn’t want to. No, it was much deeper. ”
Like Abraham, Chase acknowledged that Gandolfini’s issues had nothing to do with the show itself.
“He never refused to do anything,” Chase said. “He never said, ‘Wait in the trailer and come get me when you’re ready to shoot the way I want.'” That never happened. ”
Gandolfini, who won three Emmy Awards for his performance as Tony Soprano, tragically passed away from a heart attack while on vacation in Rome in June 2013. He was 51 years old.
He opened up about “The Sopranos” and how “crazy” he felt in a candid conversation with NJ.com years ago in 2001, between seasons three and four.
“Yeah, I’m totally insane when I’m doing the show,” he said during an interview. “When I’m doing the show, I’m completely insane. But my family, my friends, I have good friends, they all help me.”
He added, “I became successful at a late age, so I don’t have any idea what this is all about. Well, I guess I’m a little delusional, but basically it’s work. I work hard and get a little tired sometimes, but that’s it.”
In his controversial book, “The Sopranos: Lessons I Learned from My Life on the Set of The Sopranos and the Movie Industry,” Mark Kamin, a location scout on “The Sopranos,” explained how Gandolfini’s personal demons wreaked havoc on the final season of the hit HBO show.
“While I was at the hotel bar, the crew member closest to Jim asked if I wanted to go with Jim and a few others to Atlantic City, which is over an hour away, and I said no,” Kamine wrote about one incident in season 5. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim couldn’t get up the next morning.”
Kamine went on to write that Gandolfini eventually showed up, “swearing half-memorized lines, swearing one after the other, drinking coffee or a bottle of water, or acting awkward and surly, in his usual manner when he fails.”
