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.
though it s obviously a minuscule subset of that background. yet there is a lot of people got upset about this. i think rudy got upset about this in the beginning, and i don t know whether it was the anti-defamation league or the italian thing and all that, but for some reason this thing hasn t caused a stirring opposition by any community, especially the italian-american community. let me compare it to a very unlike show, which is jersey shore. . exactly. which perpetrated every stereotype about italian americans. and the criticism was unrelenting on that show. the reason why the sopranos didn t get the same kind of criticism is because that wasn t the only thing you saw. you saw so much more. you saw the humanity in people. the good wife. the good wife. the family dynamics, the cultural aspects of it that made it so much more than just a stereotype. this is a clip here of james gandolfini s appearance on inside the actor s studio with james. it answers the program s
may i ask a point, i am so inappropriately dressed for this occasion. we were going to let it go. i m not. we were in the edit room. i was in the edit room all day with my 250th episode of inside the actor s studio. this is how i dress in the edit room. it says arrested development because i was in it and they sent it to me. i m not advertising arrested development and wish i were wearing a nice appropriate suit for roger. roger might be amused and interested. you could be wearing a green turtleneck like he was in the early clip. there s something amazing about watching two people talk about movies and talk about art and talk about things they care about that is so compelling and so compelling i found myself today falling down a total youtube spiral in which i just watched. what did they say about good fellas and aliens and jurassic park and every one
beginning of the show, there were people who thought these were a couple of chuckle heads and tuned in to see them bicker and it seemed at times roger would look at gene and say, you are about the dumbest guy i ever sat across from in my life and gene would be prickly and would pull it back and sometimes cut it off unceremoniously. that s why, as we tuned in to laugh, we eventually developed this respect. wait a minute. these guys are having a discussion about art on national tv and they re bringing people into it. they care enough to get genuinely ticked off at each other, a key. you re sending a sub-textural cue to the viewer that it matters. may i ask a point, i am so inappropriately dressed for this occasion. we were going to let it go. i m not. we were in the edit room. i was in the edit room all day with my 250th episode of inside the actor s studio.