The former CEO of HBO has revealed that "The Sopranos" lead James Gandolfini once dared the network to release him after reacting poorly to an intervention for his substance abuse issues.
"We did an intervention with him at my apartment in New York," Chris Albrecht shared in the new Max docuseries,
"Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos." "That was to try to get him to go to a facility for rehab. We'd had a lot of friction by that point, and the ruse was that I was inviting Jimmy over so we could talk things through and kind of clear the air."
Detailing how things erupted from there, Albrecht paints a picture of Gandolfini going full Soprano over attempts to help him, saying, "He walked in, and he saw everybody sitting there, and he went, 'Aw, f**k this.' And he walked out," Albrecht recalled, noting that the actor's sisters and several "Sopranos" castmates were also in attendance. "Everybody went, 'Jimmy, Jimmy!' And he turned to me and he went, 'Fire me,' and he left."
"Sopranos" actor Steven Van Zandt says in the documentary that Gandolfini routinely threatened to leave the show. "He probably quit the show every other day. Maybe every day," Van Zandt said. "Every other day we would go to a bar and we would have the exact same conversation. We'd get drunk and [he'd] say, 'I'm done. I can't, I'm not going back.' And I would say, 'Okay, you got a hundred people depending on you here.' And he's like, 'Ah, yeah, yeah, okay.'"
Gandolfini earned a number of awards for his performance as New Jersey mafia mobster Tony Soprano, including three Emmy Awards, five Screen Actors Guild Awards, and one Golden Globe. He died in 2013 of cardiac arrest while on a family vacation in Italy.
