Drea de Matteo On James Gandolfini Death & Generosity Towards 'The Sopranos' Staff

Transcript

00:00Do you still look back with such fond memories of that time in your life?

00:04I do. It was the greatest time, and there was still an innocence back then.

00:09The world's changed a lot. I know that David was doing commentary on the decline of American

00:13civilization, but the decline, that was the beginning of a decline. 9-11 was real. That

00:19was when we knew our freedoms were going to be compromised. We weren't Hollywood. We were

00:22the anti-Hollywood. They didn't even like us. We would walk down the red carpet and they'd be like,

00:26we don't even want to talk to those people. They talk like this. We don't need them.

00:36That doesn't taint the experience, but what it just seems like is they have fallen in line with

00:42the rest of the world where everybody's doing something to get over on everybody financially.

00:48It's just more money and power, money, power, money, power. In the midst of that,

00:53lives get destroyed. His memory was tampered with. It's lame. I know there are stories like

00:59that out there. There's a book out there by some locations guy on the show, another

01:03douchebag, excuse my language. I don't even know the guy, but HBO and David Chase, they had a

01:11really good opportunity. Instead, they told secrets about an intervention, which probably

01:19should have never happened. I didn't even know that was happening when that was happening. Why

01:25are you exposing shit like that? When he died, he was not partying. He had a heart attack and it was

01:33not what everybody wants. If you tell that story, everyone's assuming that his death was related to

01:39that. It was not. When David Chase answers, were you surprised? And he goes, no. All of us were

01:44like, oh my gosh, that's so dismissive. We were all shocked that he died. He died after taking his

01:54son to the Sistine Chapel and buying, I don't know, a poster of the Sistine Chapel and saying,

02:01I'm going to stare at this every day to remember that I have to work harder. This is the story?

02:06We're going to tell that story. I remember you told a story about how generous he was on set.

02:12So generous. So generous. Yes, that was a big story. Everybody knows the story, I think, about

02:17when we got the DVD deals that he pulled us each into his trailer and gave us each a check for

02:23$33,000, I think. Yeah. And then he had a bunch of... I wasn't there. I was already off the show,

02:31but my best friend, who was a PA on the show, she became my best friend.

02:37He had security guards at the Emmys in the last week of the Emmys, the last year of the Emmys,

02:44sorry, and had all these watches and gave out watches to everybody. I think they brought a

02:49lot of the crew out for that last Emmys.