Tony Sirico turned Paulie Walnuts from a cartoon of a big-mouthed mobster into a living, breathing, against-all-odds charming wiseguy. Alan Sepinwall on the death of a ‘Sopranos’ icon.
Sirico could be sensitive regarding questions about his extra-legal past. Before the fourth season, I was working on a feature about the large number of actors on the show who came to acting late in life, after other kinds of work. Sirico took mild offense at even being mentioned in such an article, arguing that whatever he had done before he went into showbiz was long in the past, and that he had been appearing in movies and TV shows for more than 25 years by that point.
There is a version of the character Chase created who is an utter caricature in the hands of a different actor. Certainly,had room for that. But the joy of Sirico’s performance — what made Paulie so charismatic and beloved despite the fact that he was a miserable, homicidal, self-pitying prick — was how it managed to have things both ways. Sirico was not subtle, but somehow, he was nuanced.
In one of the best episodes of the series’ final season, “Remember When,” Tony and Paulie take an unscheduled trip to Florida to lie low after the body of Tony’s first murder victim is unearthed by the cops. We know that Paulie has come to revere his boss, to the point where, a few seasons earlier, after Tony threw out a painting of himself with his late, beloved horse Pie-O-My, Paulie retrieved it from a dumpster and had it repainted to show Tony as a respected military commander.
Maybe the best testament to the nature and specificity of Sirico’s performance and persona came when Chase revisited the world of. He asked Sirico to record all of the young Paulie dialogue for actor Billy Magnussen to listen to — a measure he didn’t take with anyone else in the cast interpreting a famousit was because of “the way he talks, his gestures, all this stuff. Nobody can touch his hair. The stories. The way he bugs his eyes when he’s surprised. Great expressions.
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