Juliet Polcsa was the costume designer The Sopranos, liked to say that most of the HBO Mob drama’s core cast members in real life dressed nothing like the characters they so famously played on TV. Tony Sirico was the irritated, inflexible and unforgettable Soprano. Capo Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri. Polcsa recalled a fitting at Sirico’s home where Sirico was happy to find that the shirt she selected for Paulie was the same as one he had at his house. “A year later,”I was told by her shortly before the series ended. “he ripped his own shirt and said, ‘I need that shirt as a replacement.’”
That anecdote — delivered by Polcsa in a dead-on impression of Sirico’s swaggering Brooklyn-born cadence — is instructive in two ways. One is that the line between Sirico and Paulie Walnuts was thinner than any slice of meat ever served at Satriale’s — as close in public persona, if not in capacity for violence and cruelty, as it is possible for an actor and character to get, unless the performer is literally playing himself. The other is that few actors in the history of filmed entertainment have taken more pleasure in being linked to their most famous role than Sirico — who died on July 8 at age 79 — did, in ways that invite endless stories from anyone who was lucky enough to know him. And those are stories often delivered haltingly, because the resemblance between fact and fiction was so absurdly dead-on that the storyteller can’t help but crack up in the middle of it.
It was, for example, in the second half of that first year. Sopranos Season, when the cast met for a reading of the season finale. Among the episode’s many major developments, Paulie and his protégé Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) gun down rival wiseguy Mikey Palmice (Al Sapienza). According to Sopranos David Chase, the creator, speaks in interview about the book I coauthored. The Sopranos Sessions, Sapienza “campaigned vigorously to stay on the show”At the final read-through “some kind of wiseguy comment”Sirico did not appreciate. Chase said, with laughter, that Sirico played finger guns at Sapienza, and then he went. “‘Dat dat dat dat.’ Because he’s the one who kills him!”
Or, for that matter, there are the stories of Sirico’s life before acting, when, if he was not exactly Paulie Walnuts, he was definitely someone Paulie would have known and held a minor grudge against. Sirico was arrested 28 more times during those years, and spent seven years in prison. The worst incident occurred when a rival criminal caught Sirico kissing the woman he liked and shot him in his leg. Sirico explained it all in the 2001 Rolling Stone Cover story The Sopranos, “At the time, all I thought about was, ‘Fucking ruined my white suit.’”
Sirico might be sensitive about questions concerning his extra-legal past. I was working on an article about the show’s many actors who became actors late in their lives, after doing other jobs. Sirico was mildly offended at being mentioned in such a piece, arguing that anything he had done prior to entering showbiz was long-term and that he had been acting in TV and movies for over 25 years. He acknowledged that he had taken elements from his character as Paulie’s tough old friends, such the way that he kept both his hands in front of him, to show that Paulie was always vigilant. He wanted to be viewed as someone who was chosen to play Paulie Walnuts not because he had been involved in armed robbery.
He told the backstory about his hands with many variations over the years. He often credited James Cagney movies for introducing Sirico to this stance. But however much of his performance was drawn from gangster films, from tough guys Sirico had known, or from Sirico’s own persona, it was instantly indelible. Paulie Walnuts was vain, petty and both the bully defender of an old-fashioned code of tough guys and a victim who has always had someone else to blame. (Moments after gunning down Mikey Palmice, Paulie is more upset to realize that he crashed through poison ivy before delivering the kill shot than he is with the thought of having taken another man’s life. No doubt, the itching was all Mikey’s fault for running away.)
Chase’s character is not the only one that can be made into a cartoon. Certainly, The Sopranos There was plenty of room. But the joy of Sirico’s performance — what made Paulie so charismatic and beloved despite the fact that he was a miserable, homicidal, self-pitying prick — was how it managed to have things both ways. Sirico was not subtle but he was subtle. Although he played Paulie loud and proud, he did so to make up for his huge insecurities. (In that same Season One finale, when James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano confesses to his crew that he’s been seeing a therapist, Paulie admits that he did briefly as well: “I had some issues.” Say no more.) Much of the time, he is comic relief — spectacular comic relief, never more than in the classic “Pine Barrens” episode where Paulie and Christopher are lost in the frozen woods, Paulie’s immaculate winged pompadour a frayed mess, one of his loafers lost in the snow — but he is never less than terrifying when a scene calls upon him to threaten someone.
Paulie is older than the other members of Tony’s inner circle, a former underling of Tony’s father who is one of the last of his generation from the Family to still be active. He attempts to present himself as a venerable figure, but he’s frequently an object of pity: a lonely old man whose big mouth and constant self-aggrandizement (like his habit of repeating his own jokes to potential new listeners only moments after he just told them) are indulged mainly because no one wants the headache of offending him. (When Tony, Christopher, and Paulie go to Naples in Season Two, every Italian — including one played with silent disapproval by Chase himself — looks upon the obnoxious, ignorant Paulie with contempt.) If Sirico captured only the character’s slicked-down veneer, Paulie would still be an important part of the show. But it was his ability to convey the ridiculous, childish, hurt and hurtful man beneath the overcompensating exterior that made the character special enough to keep around for the run of the series, when so many of Tony’s other allies kept dying.
“This isn’t to downplay anyone else,”Chase stated that in Sopranos Sessions, “but Paulie… I don’t know. He’s a character you love to write. He has a strange outlook on life, and you enjoy going there. He’s very entertaining.”(Michael imperioli had a tendency to feature Paulie heavily in the few episodes he wrote over time because, as he once said to me, he loved hearing Sirico read the lines he wrote.
In one of the best episodes of the series’ final season, “Remember When,” Tony and Paulie take an unscheduled trip to Florida to lie low after the body of Tony’s first murder victim is unearthed by the cops. Paulie has grown to love his boss to the extent that, after Tony had thrown out a picture of himself and his beloved horse Pie-O-My, Paulie went to a dumpster to retrieve it and had it repainted in order to portray Tony as a respected military commander. Tony, on the other hand, has long had very little patience for Paulie, not only because he’s the worst earner among his captains, but because he is such an annoying person to be around. Forced to spend extended quality time with this aging blowhard, Tony’s patience reaches its limit. After listening to Paulie’s umpteenth story about the good old days, he declares that “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” When they go out on a fishing boat together, both Paulie and the audience can see Tony considering how easy it would be to simply kill the old man and dump him in the ocean — less for any strategic advantage it might give Tony in his desire to avoid prison, than because he just doesn’t want to have to be in this guy’s company anymore. The same episode features a photo of the young Paulie kissing his bicep — a picture, of course, of the real Tony Sirico in the Sixties — and it is clear that he has been unable to let go of the version of himself from that picture as the decades have marched on. He responds to the nightmare by pounding on his dumbbells, not wanting those biceps to shrink with age.
Sirico can be loud behind the scenes but his colleagues find him endearing, not irritating. Chase was a notoriously strict producer who didn’t want his actors to improvise or alter the direction. Chase chuckled when he remembered how “Tony Sirico was a part-time director all the time: ‘Stay, stay, stay over here! Come on over here with me!’”
Maybe the best testament to the nature and specificity of Sirico’s performance and persona came when Chase revisited the world of The Sopranos The prequel film came many years later The Many Saints of Newark. He asked Sirico to record all of the young Paulie dialogue for actor Billy Magnussen to listen to — a measure he didn’t take with anyone else in the cast interpreting a famous The character in the show.
Chase explained that it was because of “the way he talks, his gestures, all this stuff. Nobody can touch his hair. The stories. The way he bugs his eyes when he’s surprised. Great expressions. It was sort of beyond doing.”
That nightmare that began late in the night “Remember When,”Paulie confronts Big Pussy (Vincent Pastore), the ghost of his friend and he asks. “When my time comes, tell me: Will I stand up?” Taken literally, the question is a reference to Pussy asking to sit down right before he was shot to pieces by Paulie, Tony, and Steven Van Zandt’s Silvio. But it’s more deeply about Paulie’s fear of his own craven and neurotic nature, and about his suspicion that he hasn’t done enough — or, really, anything — with his life.
Long before Tony Sirico’s time came, he stood up. He stood out even amongst the Hall of Fame cast of one of television’s greatest shows.