Image Credit: David Chase photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Grooming by Barbara Guillaume for Forward Artists. Styled by Stephanie Tricola. Suit by Emporio Armani. Shirt by Theory. Tie by Louis Vuitton. Tailored by Neli Abrahamyan.
When the date was set for Rolling Stone’s digital cover shoot with the cast of The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase realized it would be the 14th anniversary of the Sopranos series finale. So, as any godfather worth his salt would, the series creator brought champagne to set, toasting with the actors who brought so many of those familiar Sopranos characters back to life. Though he’s not typically one for nostalgia. When cameras finally rolled on Many Saints, a project that had been a fantasy for many for years, “there was a lot going through my mind,” Chase says, “like the fact that I wasn’t directing it. But I really wasn’t thinking about The Sopranos at all. It was just making a movie about this guy Dickie Moltisanti, and this kid Tony Soprano.”
Michela De Rossi (Giuseppina Bruno)
Image Credit: Michela De Rossi photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Hair Styling by Clariss Rubeinstein for Fram Agency. Makeup by Jenna Kristina for The Wall Group. Market Editors Luis Campuzano, Emily Mercer & Thomas Waller. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists.
When Michela De Rossi flew to New York to do a chemistry test for her role as Giuseppina Moltisanti in The Many Saints of Newark, it was her first time flying alone — her first time leaving Europe at all, in fact — and she didn’t really speak English at the time. At the audition, she felt a connection with the often-mysterious David Chase. “The first time I entered the room,” she recalls, “I saw a man sitting in a chair with his arms folded, with sunglasses and a flower shirt. And I was thinking, ‘OK, I have no idea who he could be, but I’m sure he’s the boss.’ Because I didn’t know him before. And he said, like, two sentences in two hours, and they were so precise. But then a friendship started — a great relationship, we had.”
Gabriella Piazza (Joanne Moltisanti)
Image Credit: Gabriella Piazza photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Hair styled by Richard Marin for Cloutier Remix. Makeup by Todd Harris. Market Editors Luis Campuzano, Emily Mercer & Thomas Waller. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists. Coat & Dress by Chloe.
The daughter of an FBI agent who never allowed his kids to watch Mob movies growing up, Piazza had only just started bingeing The Sopranos when she got the audition to play Dickie Moltisanti’s wife (and Christopher Moltisanti’s mother), Joanne. By the time production began, she had seen enough to appreciate being part of a scene that recreates a story memorably told on the show. “On paper, [the scene] seems pretty dark and violent, yet when Alan [Taylor] would call cut, all of us on set could not stop laughing,” Piazza says. “Then and there, in real time, I was able to see the brilliance of David Chase’s writing. To quote Alan, I got to witness ‘this blend of intense drama with outrageous comedy’ firsthand, and that was the greatest gift ever.”
Ray Liotta (Aldo “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti)
Image Credit: Ray Liotta photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Grooming by Joanna Pensinger for The Wall Group. Market Editors Luis Campuzano, Emily Mercer & Thomas Waller. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists Jacket by Brioni. Shirt by James Perse.
David Chase tried to hire Liotta to play Ralphie Cifaretto on The Sopranos, and says it never even occurred to him to offer Liotta the role of Tony in the late Nineties, since Liotta was already a movie star. Liotta says he would have turned the part down anyway: Goodfellas wasn’t too far in the past, “and I would have thought, ‘I just played a guy like that.'” More recently, though, Liotta says he’s stopped worrying about taking comparable roles: “After a time, you just want to work and be a part of things — a good guy or bad guy, or two good guys and bad guys. It’s just more about the work than trying to distance myself from anything that I had done before. [But] this is only the third person in the Mob that I ever did.”
Leslie Odom Jr.
Image Credit: Leslie Odom Jr. photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Makeup by Joanna Pensinger for The Wall Group. Hair by Kali Patrice. Styled by Avo Yermagyan.
Leslie Odom Jr. was in the half of the Many Saints cast that were playing characters who had never appeared on The Sopranos, and he says, “I didn’t envy the other guys. That’s really, really challenging.” He compared the task of recreating famous Sopranos figures to his Oscar-nominated performance as Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami: “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Unlike with Aaron Burr [in Hamilton], I knew it was going to be all about verisimilitude on some level with Sam: How close could I come to him? And those guys, they had the same challenge, so I didn’t envy them one bit.”
Alexandra Intrator (teenage Janice Soprano)
Image Credit: Alexandra Intrator photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Set Designed by Wooden Ladder. Hair Styled by Richard Marin for Cloutier Remix. Makeup by Todd Harris. Market Editors Luis Campuzano, Emily Mercer & Thomas Weller. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists. Dress by Zimmerman.
Where some of her Many Saints costars, both young and well into their adulthood, had never watched The Sopranos before being cast, Intrator had a stay-at-home dad, “so my development years weren’t spent so much with Cinderella and Mulan, but more with Tony Soprano and [The Wire’s] Stringer Bell. I definitely got my mouth washed out with soap a few times for dropping F-bombs as a toddler, and instead of saying my dad was retired, I would say he worked in waste management. It was a whole thing.”
John Magaro (Silvio Dante)
Image Credit: John Magaro photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Grooming by James McMahon for Cloutier Remix. Styled by Luis Campuzano. Polo by Ben Sherman. Pants by Emporio Armani.
Magaro starred in David Chase’s feature film directorial debut Not Fade Away, where none other than Stevie Van Zandt taught him how to play a convincing wannabe rock star — time that turned out to be doubly well spent when Magaro was cast to play the young Silvio in Many Saints. “Silvio’s mannerisms,” he says, “as far as the way he stands and the way he carries himself, is a lot like Steven in real life. He has his shoulders up, he gesticulates with his hands, opens his arms. He has a specific walk that he does. From decades of being a rock star, there’s a confidence that he has, and a kind of don’t-give-a-shit attitude. It’s funny: In the show, he does the famous ‘Every time I think I’m out…’ Pacino line from Godfather Part III, and rewatching it, I don’t know if Stevie will agree with this, but I thought he was doing [Silvio] how he thinks Pacino would have done it. It’s Steven with a touch of Pacino.”
Michael Gandolfini (Tony Soprano)
Image Credit: Michael Gandolfini photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig & Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Grooming by Jamie Taylor for Forward Artists. Market Editors Luis Campuzano, Emily Mercer & Thomas Waller. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists. Polo shirt by Sandro.
The first scene Michael Gandolfini shot as the teenage Tony Soprano didn’t make it into the final cut of Many Saints, but it was a fitting introduction into the Sopranos world: a scene where Tony and Dickie Moltisanti have an argument, which results in first Dickie, and then Tony’s dad, Johnny Boy Soprano, slapping Tony in the face. “And Alessandro [Nivola] did not hold back a single slap,” recalls Gandolfini. “At first, I was like, ‘How do we do this?’ And Sandro was like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And he slapped me in the face. I was like, ‘Oh. You’re the hit people.’ But it was fun. It was boot camp. You normally shoot three scenes in a day. That was the only scene we shot that day. So it was like 12 hours of slapping each other in the face.”
Image Credit: Samson Moeakiola photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Grooming by Andrea Samuels for Cloutier Remix. Styled by Luis Campuzano. Polo by Brioni. Pants by Emporio Armani.
Many Saints is Samson Moeakiola’s first acting job, and he was lucky enough to spend time with the original Big Pussy, Vincent Pastore, to prepare. He even sat in on Pastore and Maureen Van Zandt’s acting class, where Pastore claimed Moeakiola was his nephew “to throw everyone off the scent of me playing the younger version of him.” Moeakiola calls Pastore a mentor who recorded all of the young Pussy’s dialogue for him to listen to before each filming day. “Everybody else around me already had big resumes, and this was my first job,” he says. “So without his support, I would have felt really insecure.”
Alessandro Nivola (Dickie Moltisanti)
Image Credit: Alessandro Nivola photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig & Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Grooming by Barbara Guillaume for Forward Artists. Market Editor Luiz Campuzano. Styled by Stephanie Tricola. Sweater by Hermes. Pants by Kingsman.
By the time Many Saints was greenlit, Alessandro Nivola had been working steadily in Hollywood for 25 years, with roles in quiet indies, splashy action movies, and everything in between. But for some reason he’d never had the breakout part that would make him a household name. David Chase decided to remedy that situation, asking Nivola to audition for the lead in his Sopranos prequel movie. When the call came that he’d gotten the part, Nivola was at the famed Chateau Marmont in L.A. “I went into the public bathroom down there, closed the stall, and just put my head in my hands and cried for a good 10 minutes,” he says. “I think they thought I was getting divorced or something terrible was happening. I just let it all hang out. It was such a relief.”
Vera Farmiga (Livia Soprano)
Image Credit: Vera Farmiga photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig & Shelby Gordon. Set Design by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Hair by Allison Mondesir. Makeup by Randy L Daudlin. Styled by Lizzy Rosenberg. Market Editor Luis Campuzano. Blouse & Skirt by Gucci.
Though Vera Farmiga never got around to watching The Sopranos until after she was hired to play Tony’s mother, Livia, in Many Saints, she knows its New Jersey turf very well, having grown up in Irvington, practically a stone’s throw away from Livia’s home on the HBO series. “There’s a scene in the movie where I’m talking about how another boy had to go to St. Barnabas [Hospital] after a football injury,” she says, “And I was born at St. Barnabas.”
Jon Bernthal (Johnny Boy Soprano)
Image Credit: Jon Bernthal photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Grooming by Kim Verbeck for The Wall Group. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists. Polo by King and Tuckfield. Pants by Kilton.
For Sopranos superfan Jon Bernthal, getting hired to play Tony Soprano’s father Johnny Boy in Many Saints was the fulfillment of a dream from the start of his career. “The Sopranos was at its height when I was first deciding to be an actor and taking that leap to go to New York with my theater company,” Bernthal says. “I remember people saying in the beginning, when I was just hungry and fighting tooth and nail for every part, that the key to making it as an actor was to have goals that are specific and to know exactly what you wanted. My goals were specific: I just wanted to be involved in that show in any way.”
Billy Magnussen (Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri)
Image Credit: Billy Magnussen photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Grooming by James MacMahon for Cloutier Remix. Market Editors Luis Campuzano, Emily Mercer & Thomas Waller. Styled by Stephanie Tricola for Honey Artists. Polo by Brioni. Pants by Emporio Armani.
Though he initially taped an audition to play Dickie Moltisanti, Billy Magnussen was happy to wind up as the young Paulie Walnuts, as much for the acting challenge of evoking Tony Sirico’s performance in the series as for the fun of playing an iconic character. “I can’t just do what Tony did,” he says, “and I can’t play, like, a carbon copy of it. But I think you can get the essence of a character and the feel for it, especially a younger version of it. So it was about doing the research on him, seeing how he carried himself, mannerisms and cadence of speech. It was that kind of work.”
Corey Stoll (Junior Soprano)
Image Credit: Corey Stoll photographed by Joe Pugliese for Rolling Stone. Produced by Walaa Elsiddig and Shelby Gordon. Grooming by Melissa Dezarete for Kalpana US. Styled by Luis Campuzano. Coat by Hermes. Turtleneck by Stoffa.
Corey Stoll’s professional acting career was just beginning as The Sopranos came to a close, so, “I never got an audition, never got to be on it,” he says. “That was always a real regret.” By the time the role of Uncle Junior in Many Saints came around, Stoll was so well established that he didn’t even have to audition; all it took was a meeting with David Chase and director Alan Taylor. “It was all very civilized — a nice Italian lunch with the two of them,” he says. “It was kind of funny, because they’re very reserved, and I was bursting at the seams with excitement to be a part of it. It was just thrilling.”
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