Major spoilers for the greatest TV show of all time to follow.
Two things will strike you on a rewatch of The Sopranos: a) you’ll notice just how stupidly funny it is, even in its darkest moments – Tony’s heavily slapstick murder of Ralphie Cifaretto springs to mind – and b) you’ll feel the true weight of the darkness at its core, especially as the series marches toward its conclusion. Dramatic moments – Tony and Carmela’s cataclysmic fight in season four’s “Whitecaps”, AJ’s suicide attempt in season six’s “The Second Coming”, Tony gently smothering Christopher to death in season six’s “Kennedy and Heidi” – hit even harder, perhaps because we’re even further endeared to the characters after another 80-odd hours together.
But no arc feels quite as devastating as that of Adriana La Cerva, played by Drea De Matteo. Drafted in as fledgling mafioso Christopher Moltisanti’s girlfriend early in season one, she was one of the few true outsiders in the mob’s orbit. “You couldn’t help but fall in love with her because she was sort of collateral damage,” Sopranos director Tim Van Patten says. A loveable dumbass, she is perfect prey for the FBI, who enlist her as an informant in season four, and we immediately get that horrible sense of what’s to come.
Adriana’s demise is at the heart of season five’s “Long Term Parking”, an episode often spoken about in reverent tones, alongside season three’s “Pine Barrens”, as perhaps the show’s greatest ever. “Long Term Parking” works so well because it so perfectly teases out Adriana’s death after she confesses her sins to Christopher, leading the audience to believe that she might just make it out of New Jersey alive. But it almost didn't play out like that, writer Terence Winter tells GQ. There was a scene in an early cut where Christopher tells Tony that Adriana is a rat, which was removed from the final version (it appears in a later episode as a flashback instead). “Tim [Van Patten] and I felt really strongly that it should be in there,” Winter says. “We were wrong.”
The decision to remove it ratchets up the dramatic tension as Adriana sits in Silvio’s car, ostensibly on the way to see an injured Christopher in the hospital, allowing the audience to delude themselves about her fate for that bit longer. And then we see the car move into the depths of the woods, where only bad things happen.
“When I look back on the show, it’s one of my favourite decisions, if you want to call it that,” creator David Chase says, almost 20 years later, of the call to remove the scene.
Rewatching “Long Term Parking” for the purposes of this interview gave Chase a renewed sense of appreciation for the performance at the centre of the episode. “I came away thinking that Drea De Matteo was superlative. It’s one of the best acting jobs I’ve seen in a long time,” he says.
In a series of conversations, Chase, De Matteo, and the episode’s writer and director, Winter and Van Patten, break down its making, and the execution of one of the most devastating TV deaths of all time.
1. Creating Adriana
Adriana La Cerva went from being an extra to a pivotal main cast member over the course of five seasons, after De Matteo had impressed Chase on set.
David Chase (Creator): You’re always looking for something unpredictable, and yet, something you can depend on. She had both of those things. She was in the pilot and she played a no-name hostess at an Italian restaurant. I think she said something like, “Your table’s over here, sir.” Then, when we wanted Christopher to have a girlfriend, I remembered her because she was very interesting looking. She always reminded me of the Monica Vitti school, looks wise, of Italian actresses. And she came in [to read for Adriana]. In the course of it, Christopher grabs her and she goes, “Ooowww-uh!”, like that. And boom, just like that, that role is yours. Because I had heard my daughter, I had heard my nieces talk that way.
Drea De Matteo (Adriana La Cerva): I used to question shit and go to [David Chase]. Like, “Do I have to say it like this?” I didn’t like saying “Christopher” because I felt like I was faking the accent so heavily. ‘Christofuuuhhh.’ And now it’s my fucking claim to fame.
Terence Winter (Writer): People say, “Oh, Adriana’s the moral centre of the show.” I wouldn’t go that far. There’s no morality there. But she was certainly sympathetic.
Tim Van Patten (Director): You couldn’t help but fall in love with her because she was sort of collateral damage of this world. You could see her sinking into it, and it was like watching someone drown.
DDM: For me, the “method” stuff was more like I had to have the real nails. I couldn’t have press-ons. I had to sit in the seat and have these enormous friggin’ nails put on. I needed the hair. I needed the wardrobe. When I say “method”, it wasn’t like I was about to start taking laxatives [to replicate Adriana’s irritable bowel syndrome, brought on by the stress of being an FBI informant in later seasons]. But there definitely was a scene where Michael [Imperioli, who played Christopher Moltisanti] and I smoked weed when we were supposed to be stoned. I think it was Livia’s funeral. If you watch my face, I was trying not to laugh the whole time. That’s nerve-wracking when you have the fucking entire cast there plus a bazillion extras and time is of the essence. I couldn’t stop. I was really stoned.
DC: I didn’t know [they were really high] at the time, but I’ve learned it since. It’s very funny.
DDM: We all drank, too. When we were sitting around the dinner table, we’d all have real wine. We were celebrating all the time.
2. …And making the call to un-create her
All stories passed through David Chase, and he knew that as soon as they’d made the decision to have Adriana wrapped up with the FBI, she was going to have to go. But De Matteo wasn’t in the know until much later on…
TW: Once we made a decision that Adriana was going to have a relationship with that FBI agent Robyn, we knew inevitably where it was going to head.
DC: I really didn’t want to kill Adriana. I think what really was going on was I didn’t want to kill Drea De Matteo. She was different from everyone else in the series. I didn’t want her to go, but I knew she had to go. It’s a TV show – bad things had to happen to good people. In terms of the code or the philosophical stance of that show, she’d done the wrong thing. She was informing on her lover, on Tony, the whole thing. Once Christopher admitted that, which took a lot of doing, Tony had no choice.
TW: David would always say, the function of network television is to reassure you that everything’s fine. We caught the bad guy, it all worked out, and you should buy these products we’re advertising. Because [HBO] didn’t have advertising, David’s message was that very often life does not work out, or it’s unexplained, or it’s very disturbing. We were the opposite feeling – everything’s not alright. Everything’s fucked up.
DC: I don’t remember [telling De Matteo she was going to be killed off the show]. Isn’t that odd? I remember other conversations of telling actors they were going. I don’t remember that one.
DDM: I went to him in episode five of season five when I had the neck brace on. I said, “Hey, I want to direct this movie while we’re on hiatus, but I need to know what my schedule is like. Am I coming back [next season]?” And he was like, “Sit down.” And normally he has a meeting in his office for these moments. With me, we sat on a street curb in New Jersey. And he said, “Um, so, you know, you’ve been a rat. So we are going to play with the idea of taking you out. But we’re going to shoot it two ways. We’re gonna shoot it where you get away, and we’re gonna shoot it where you get killed so I have options, and so we don’t mess with the confidentiality on the show.” So none of us knew how it was ending. So I said to him, ’but that still doesn’t answer my question.’ And he was like, “I mean, you’re probably going to die.”
DC: Sitting outside on a curb with Drea De Matteo does ring a bell. But I believe it was earlier on, when we did an [episode] called “A Hit Is a Hit” [season one, episode 10]. She was a film student at NYU. I don’t know how much acting experience she had. And by the time we got to that episode, she was really great. I took her outside and on the curb and I said, “I believe you have a huge career in front of you. And if there’s anything I can do to help you, I’ll do it. And I hope that’s of value to you to see that somebody feels that way.” She said it was.
GQ (to De Matteo): You’ve said previously that you had heard David Chase took the person who was getting whacked out to dinner. Were you disappointed that he didn’t do this for you?
DDM: I figured maybe it was because I wasn’t a man. I don’t know what the reasoning for it was. Maybe it would have been awkward. I don’t even know if that’s true that people were taken to dinner. I heard that, I heard that I didn’t get the dinner, but I didn’t feel slighted.
DC: What would happen was, I would inform them, and then their colleagues, their pals, would take them out for dinner. Other members of the cast would take them out. I never went to one of those.
TW: When it came time to decide who was going to write the episode, and this was really uncharacteristic of me, I just really forcefully said in the writers room, “I’m writing this one.” Everybody just went, “Okay, alright.” I was really like, unintentionally dickish about it, but I just felt really strongly that I wanted to write this one and everybody backed off.
3. Adriana confesses everything to Christopher
The most brutal, emotionally wrenching scene in the episode, where Adriana confesses to Christopher about her situation with the FBI, took a lot out of both De Matteo and Imperioli.
DDM: That scene was the hardest for me. That was tough, with all the physical stuff we had to do there. Michael, when he has to choke me, I was like, “You gotta go for it a little bit.” I said, “You’re safe. I’m not gonna freak out.” Michael was like, “I’m not gonna fuckin’ choke you.” So basically, in that scene, I’m pushing [my throat] up into his hand to choke myself. My eyes were popping out of my head.
TVP: You have to strategise the way to shoot it, because you don’t want to wear them out. [De Matteo and Imperioli] were so close, as human beings, as actors, as friends. It was almost like I could just sit back and watch this unfold. So I tried to keep it as simple as possible, there’s no tricky camera movements in there, every shot has emotion in it, every shot has a story in it.
TW: They made it look easy, even though it was really difficult. And I remember the slow build-up as she’s yammering away and talking, and Michael is just processing, processing, processing, and then just explodes and punches her and chokes her. It was really difficult to watch.
TVP: The scene even had a couple of funny lines in it. Adriana trying to convince Christopher to run away and he says, “Yes, I can finally start my memoirs.” [Laughs.] It’s all so Shakespearean. Everybody is so doomed.
TW: And the weird thing is, the bathrobe that Drea was wearing during that scene – at the end of the year, every year, we would have a wardrobe sale and I used to buy a bunch of stuff. I used to donate a lot of it to charity events that you could bid on. I ended up buying the robe that Adriana was choked in. And my wife wore it for the next five years. Every time I’d see her in it – like, oh my god, this is Adriana.
DDM: Oh my god, I can’t even believe it. I mean, I might pay money for that robe. I own a few pieces, like the tiger suit, which I wore this Halloween.
GQ (to De Matteo): Did the accent come back to you immediately?
DDM: Yeah, pretty much. [Laughs.]
4. The deleted scene
Whether or not to remove the scene where Christopher confesses to Tony from the cut of the episode was a sticking point among the team.
DDM: I was really upset when I read that scene between Michael and Jim [Gandolfini] in the laundry room. I was like, then there’s no build-up, there’s no drama to it. I just didn’t understand how that scene would play out with Stevie [Van Zandt, who played Silvio] and I in the car. It just felt redundant.
GQ (to De Matteo): Is it true that you asked the writers to leave out the scene?
DDM: They might have stumbled upon it themselves. I don’t remember things clearly at all about back then, but that was a thing for me.
TW: Tim and I felt really strongly that it should be in there. We were wrong, we thought it should be in the episode. David was the one who said no. David was like, “No, I’m telling you it works better without it.”
DC: I was reminded of my intentions last night, which was that, if you had seen Christopher go to Tony, the suspense of not knowing would not have worked. And her whole internal illusion about driving to Delaware, none of that would have worked. When I look back on the show, it’s one of my favourite decisions, if you want to call it that.
5. Adriana gets whacked in the woods
Adriana’s death scene was so affecting thanks to that rug-pull set up by the confession scene being removed. And, for the first time in the show’s history, the violence was redacted, too – because the writers didn’t want to see it.
TW: Our outlines [for each episode from the writer’s room] were very, very sketchy. One that I always use as an example: there’s an episode where AJ attempts suicide [“The Second Coming”, episode 19, season six,], and he jumps into the pool, ties a cinder block around his leg and jumps. In the outline, it said “AJ attempts suicide, comic slash tragic”. That’s what I was given. For this episode, I don’t remember if we even decided how Adriana was going to die.
For this scene, I wrote specifically in the script that Silvio drags Adriana out of the car and she crawls out of frame and he follows her. And then you hear a gunshot, and then the camera drifts into the sky. It wasn’t until the episode aired, and then people started saying, you know, she’s not really dead, because you didn’t show it. I realised I didn’t want to see it. And, for the guy who wrote all of the horrible shit that I did want to see, I did not want to see Adriana get shot.
DDM: Steve [Van Zandt] didn’t want to call me a cunt. he didn’t want to pull me out of a car. He didn’t want to be forceful with me. And I was like, you gotta go for it, man.
TW: Stevie is the gentlest, sweetest guy in the world, and for him to get into that headspace and be so vicious was hard.
TVP: There was no joy in filming that scene. There was a sense of accomplishment, because I thought that the team was so respectful and honoured the day. But it felt lousy going home.
TW: I was very specific [about how the gunshots were filmed]. I said, I really want to see the camera just drift into the sky. Can you just give me that? And it almost is in a weird way, Adriana’s soul going up into the sky. I didn’t intend that, that sounds really hokey. But it was just that I wanted the camera to drift away. And then it comes back down to Tony and Carmela in the yard where he’s showing the plot of land he bought her.
DDM: Half the audience was like, did he really shoot her? Because you don’t see it. But I remember Stevie went on like, Leno, or one of those talk shows and they said, “Did you kill her?” And he said, “What do you fuckin’ think I was doing out there, shootin’ squirrels?”
6. The awards
Drea De Matteo won her first Emmy for her performance in “Long Term Parking”. Imperioli won, too. But it had taken a long time for Hollywood to warm up to The Sopranos, with the show only picking up its first Emmy for best drama series in its fifth season.
DDM: The industry didn’t want to recognise us. It felt like they really fought against it in a lot of ways at the awards. The way they treated us on the red carpet, it was like we were not a part of their society. [When] we showed up at the Emmys the first year, David Chase got a big bus with a New Jersey Transit sign [on the front]. And we all got off the bus on the red carpet. They hated it. They fucking hated it.
I did not want to win [the Emmy]. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t wanna have to get up and speak. I used to go because I felt like David would be mad if we didn’t show up to certain things. I fucking despised it. And you’ll see that after a career of doing that, I have completely disappeared from the industry. But looking back on it, fuck yeah it was nice to have won.
7. “I don’t care about anything else after this”
After “Long Term Parking”, De Matteo left The Sopranos for short-lived Friends spin-off Joey. Chase and De Matteo have since lost touch.
DC: Now that I think about it, of course what I should have done after “Long Term Parking” was gone to her and said, “You see? You see what you’ve built here? This miracle that you made?” I told her great job, but I didn’t tie it into our prior conversation [on the curb during season one]. And Drea went on to do… I think she’d be the first to tell you that she made some choices that didn’t help. She theoretically could have gone, and I know this for a fact, she could have gone from The Sopranos to top tier. And she went for network comedy.
GQ (to Chase): Did you watch Joey?
DC: No. I think I watched, like, five minutes. I mean, it was just an accent, that’s all. I just didn’t want to see that. But you know, we all have pressure from our agents. This happens all the time. They have what they want. And they get us to, you know, do stuff to make their lives better.
GQ (to De Matteo): Did you like The Many Saints of Newark [the 2021 Sopranos prequel film, written by Chase]?
DDM: [Shakes her head.]
GQ (to De Matteo): I presume you didn’t tell David Chase that.
DDM: No, but I said it on a podcast. I’m 100 years old, I’m not a baby anymore in the industry, what the fuck do I care at this point? You know what I mean? It needed to be a series, there were too many storylines going on.
DC: We should have rewatched the show before making the movie. [Laughs.]
DDM: For me, David was like my god. I always liken him to my Godfather, because he changed my life forever. I would never feel slighted by anything he did. He gave me this really beautiful gift one year. It was a vintage compact with a bird on it, and my family calls me Dre Bird. And I remember writing him a letter afterward. It was basically like, look, I don’t care if I am never accepted another day in this industry and if I never get another job for the entire time I am an actor, whatever the fuck. I know all I need to do is look in this mirror and remember that I got to take this ride of a lifetime with you guys. I will forever carry the confidence of having been on that show and being chosen to be there with you. I don’t care about anything else after this.
