20 years later, we still can’t get over this ‘Sopranos’ death
In “Inside the Episode,” writers and directors reflect on the making of their Emmy-winning episodes.
The death of Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) on “The Sopranos” was quick. The build-up to it? Not so much.
As the fifth season of the HBO mob drama wound down in spring 2004, gossip magazines breathlessly devoted “will they/won’t they” ink from “inside sources” weighing in on whether the show would kill such a beloved character. (Not to mention the when, where, why and how of it all).
When ‘The Sopranos’ premiered on HBO in January 1999, critics treated it like any other series. Then the fifth episode, ‘College,’ upended the history of American television.
But in the season’s penultimate episode, written by Terence Winter and directed by Tim Van Patten, Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) took Adriana on a one-way drive into the woods. She’s lured into the car by a trumped-up story that her fiancé, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), had attempted suicide.
In actuality, Christopher had chosen his other family and given her up as being a rat for the FBI.
“From decades of TV, people expected that something will happen at the last minute and they’ll let her go,” Winter says of the build-up to the episode in the zeitgeist.
He reminds that, since the Season 1 episode “College” when a daddy-daughter road trip veers into a gruesome death, “Sopranos” never went by that playbook.
With Adriana, Winter says, “People still wanted to convince themselves, ‘Oh, she got away.’ They still wanted the happy ending.”
“There is no happy ending here. These are horrible people,” Winter says.
But “Long Term Parking” — which ran 20 years ago today — also resulted in another kind of “hit.” Winter, De Matteo and Imperioli all received Emmys for their work, the show picked up its first drama series win and Van Patten earned a directing nomination.
So how long was Adriana’s whack in the works? And how was it decided who would pull the trigger? Winter reflects on writing his Emmy-winning episode.
Twenty years ago this week, “The Sopranos” was about to debut on HBO and creator David Chase was sure it would never amount to much.
How soon into breaking the season did the writers room know that Adriana was going to die?
Once we started the storyline where Adriana was talking to the FBI, we knew inevitably that was not going to end well. We didn’t know when, and I think we avoided it for a really long time until it just became inevitable. As you build the season, obviously, you build toward a big dramatic conclusion. And we slowly started to realize that the most dramatic thing is the ending of that story.
[“Sopranos” creator] David [Chase] would usually come in at the beginning of the year with a broad strokes road map of where the season went. I’m gonna guess that was on the map toward the end of the year.
How was it decided that Sil would be the one to do it?
Silvio is the least threatening on the surface; the most reasonable and the friendliest. I mean, if Paulie Walnuts [Tony Sirico’s hot-headed henchman] called and said, “Hey, I want to take a ride with you,” you would automatically be suspicious.
Silvio is more of a consigliere. We’d already set up on the show that nobody lies better than him.
‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase would return to his characters only in the form of a movie, but the result shows the perils of revisiting a classic.
They drive for a while, with Silvio saying reassuring things. When do you think she knew what was going to happen to her?
It’s slowly starting to occur to her. I’m sure she’s hoping against hope that she’s wrong. But she’d be crazy to know these people all this time and not be thinking, “Is this going where I think it’s going?” Also, the more he keeps talking and being positive, it’s almost the worse it is because he’s protesting too much.
She’d told Christopher, “Let’s go; let’s run away.” And she thought there was a possibility of that happening. And then he saw [a poor] family at the gas station and that did it.
Just a funny aside. I specifically wrote that he saw a [poor] family and the husband had a mullet and [Christopher began to imagine], “Oh, my God, that’s us.” And, you know, we cast an actor with long hair and I said, “Are you willing to get a mullet?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll shave my head. I’ll do whatever you want.”
On the day of filming, one of our [production assistants] called me and said come to the hair trailer. Our hair person was cutting the guy’s hair and it was not a mullet. … And he said, “I’m a hairdresser for years. This is a mullet.” I said, “Alright, so I’m not gonna argue with you.” I pulled a picture of Billy Ray Cyrus and said, “I want the full mullet.”
He called me later and goes, “As a hair person, I just felt like I could not do that to another human being. It was such an ugly hairstyle.”
If that guy had had a better haircut, would Adriana still be alive?
I think if it weren’t that guy, it would have been something else. I don’t think he wanted to change anything in his life. I think the choice between running off with Adriana and starting fresh and doing something else, getting a straight job, ultimately, that’s just not who this guy is.
Silvio never really raises his voice at Adriana when they stop the car. But he does call her the C word when he pulls her from the car and she tries to get away. Did you and the other writers think about when and how to inflict that word or other derogatory words?
He’s got a very bad temper and you’ve seen him [in another episode] fly off the handle in a card game with unbelievably vile language. He certainly can get there. It was meant to be as ugly as it possibly could be.
I’m sure he didn’t take any pleasure in [killing her]. But I think to psychologically get to the point where he was able to do it, he had to convince himself that this woman betrayed the family and was going to put them all in jail and was just absolutely the worst human being ever. And the language and his physicality speaks to all of that.
I’ve read that this was a hard scene for Van Zandt to perform. Is that true?
Absolutely. It was hard for all of us. It was hard being there watching it. He really had to work himself up for it.
The only bright spot is that day was not [Drea’s] last day. She had a couple more scenes to film so it wasn’t like that was goodbye.
When it was happening, Drea was the one saying, “You gotta really go for this; you gotta just drag me out of the car. Grab me by the hair. Let’s make this look real.” So they just went for it. But at the end of the day, everybody felt like they needed to take a shower.
When I wrote that scene, I specifically wrote it where she crawls out of frame and you don’t see him shooting. You just hear the gunshot and then the camera drifts out into the sky. And it wasn’t until later that I thought, “Wow, I’ve written some of the most horrific, violent scenes on that show and I’ve never shied away from showing it.” But I just didn’t want to see that.
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Adriana almost dies earlier in the episode. Christopher nearly strangles her to death when he learns that she’s an informant. Was there ever a chance of letting that happen?
He couldn’t have done it. I mean, he thought he was going to do it and then he couldn’t. It was either cowardice or love or whatever you want to call it, he just couldn’t bring himself to do that. He certainly thought about it and he’s looking in her eyes and he just lets her go. He just can’t continue.
You give the audience false hope because a later shot in the episode pans up from a shot of similar fall foliage. People may briefly think she’s alive before it’s revealed that the new scene is between mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco). They’re looking at a piece of land for her to build a spec house.
It’s a really creepy juxtaposition of the two aspects of Tony’s life. On the one hand, this girl’s out in the forest getting murdered. And here he is; the fruits of his criminal labor are being used to buy his wife this spec house project.
This is an emotional episode for Tony. Not only does he lose Adriana but it becomes clear that he’s going to have to take out his beloved cousin, Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi), to settle another score.
With a lot of these guys, when they go to bed at night, there’s that moment where you’re alone with yourself, and I think there’s that moment when the remorse starts creeping in. But, also, a common psychological phenomenon with people like that is that they’re always moving: they’re always doing something, they’re always gambling or drinking or doing drugs. It’s a way of avoiding the reality of what you’re doing.
A few seasons back, Silvio, Tony and Paulie killed their friend Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (Vincent Pastore) when they learned he was a rat. Do you think this killing feels different to Sil?
That was probably difficult for all of them because they were all very good friends with him. I think the level of betrayal there was deeper because this was one of their own guys.
This was collateral damage. You know, she’s Christopher’s girlfriend. She’s not a made member of the mafia, certainly, and she never promised anything; she never took an oath. And she got squeezed to the point where she really just had no choice.
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