you watch those clips, you are taken back to james gandolfini, but the cast, he wouldn t have been as great without edie falco. you see acting on stage but it is not that precise and intense. and the two of them, one of the great wildly disfunctional but fascinating marriages on television. and it takes you see kind of, in a lot of these shows, i think, the not just sort of the dark heroes who are the kind of magnetic center of them, but these ensembles. i think that s true on madmen as well and certainly on breaking bad where it s a whole world, family and set of associations that s organized around this fascinating and troubling and just endless and interesting figure. and to do that as an actor, i
no, no. no, no, no. that s it. no, no, no. you dare not change it. it s too good. think of the possibilities. james, every time i meet an actor i am in love with and think is great and you meet them and realize, somebody once said this of cary grant, you met cary grant and you wish you hadn t met him because he isn t cary grant. nobody can be cary grant in real life, because you need a line, a great moment, you need a scene. you need a camera. what was he like as opposed to his character? are you talking about cary grant or james gandolfini? let s go with the more immediate question. james gandolfini. what was he like? he was absolutely what you see on the screen there. he was himself. he was never anything but himself. you mean in your show, on your show. that s correct. that s right. remember that my show is a master class and a master s degree program at pace university. he was there to teach, and he taught our students we ve been on 19 years.
that, yeah, i did. i did it. and that now he wasn t just a star. now he was a good actor in his own mind. and that was one of the many things i ll remember about him. wow. i m always amazed at you guys when you do broadway. friday nights, saturday afternoon, saturday night and then sunday. don t forget tuesday, wednesday, wednesday and thursday either. it s just work. it s brutal, it s brutal. let me ask you about what you re doing with newsroom. my son has a part on that show. not as large as years, of course. you re the man on the show. you play a guy kind of a little like keith olbermann, maybe little like me, maybe other people in news business. what is it going to be like coming out starting this sunday? it s the most organic show i ve ever watched. it seems to come out of itself every week. it seems to grow like a human being. and that makes it so unpredictable and fascinating to people. i think one of the things that is unfair to us is that or any tv series in
sad morning. james gandolfini was not the typical leading man when you look at him physically. you think of like don draper, and then you look at gandolfini, he s bald, heavy, he s not chiseled. mr. lipton, he somehow transcended all of that with his presence, did he not? not only with his presence, a lot is being said about his appearance. he was technically an extraordinary actor, but he was on inside the actors studio where he talked about him a lot. his episode was one of the most technic and valuable episodes in 19 years. remember, when he talked about acting, he gave the students a lesson. he was with me for four or five hours and he was a lesson in acting. he was a student of school and was coached in every single one of his episodes of the
sopranos by a teacher in our school. but he gave our students that night pure gold and it was technically what you would expect from somebody like, say, pacino or from any actor who has mastered his craft. that was the astonishing thing about him. he made it look easy. all great actors make it look easy. people thought, that s james gandolfini, he s not acting. yes, he was. and he was acting brilliantly. he was an amazing actor. mark halperin, you got to watch more tv than most people got to, what was it about him that made him larger than life? why was he so well liked by the actors and actresses he worked with? he was a very nice man, he was a very shy man. if you have seen his episodes of inside the actors studio you would know he s very shy and very decent and very generous.