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Adriana La Cerva

At a glance

Played by
Drea de Matteo
Fiancée of
Christopher Moltisanti
Ran
The Crazy Horse club
Recruited by
FBI Agent Deborah Ciccerone, S4
Died
2004 — killed by Silvio Dante, "Long Term Parking" (S5E64)
Emmy
Supporting Actress, 2004

Sil… I'm not going anywhere with you.

The least culpable person in the series, and the one it kills most brutally.

How it happens

Adriana is not an ambitious criminal. She's a young woman who grew up adjacent to this world, wants a club, wants to marry Christopher, and wants an ordinary life with better handbags.

The FBI take her in stages, and the show is precise about how coercion actually works:

  1. An undercover agent, Deborah Ciccerone, poses as a friend named Danielle. Adriana, who is lonely, is thrilled to have one.
  2. The friendship is revealed as an operation. Adriana is confronted with a narcotics charge from her club and told she's looking at prison.
  3. She's flipped — not for money or malice, but out of terror.
  4. And then she can't get out. Every attempt to give the FBI nothing produces more pressure; every attempt to confess to Christopher fails.

She spends two seasons in an impossible position, and she never once volunteers anything to damage anybody. She develops a stress-related illness. She is, throughout, the only major character with no appetite for any of it.

"Long Term Parking"

Season five, episode twelve. Written by Terence Winter, directed by Tim Van Patten.

She finally tells Christopher everything and proposes witness protection — they go together, start again, no more of this.

He considers it seriously. Then, at a gas station, he watches a man scream at his wife and kids in a beaten-up car, and decides he can't be that. He drives home and calls Tony.

The next morning Silvio picks her up, saying Christopher has attempted suicide and is in the hospital. She gets in.

Chase gives the audience a false alternative first — a brief sequence of Adriana driving south, alone, getting away — before returning to the car. She notices the exit go by. The realization arrives in stages.

The killing is filmed from a distance, outside, through trees. She crawls. There's no music. The camera doesn't go closer.

Why it lands hardest

Because the moral arithmetic is completely legible.

Everyone else who dies in this show is a participant. Adriana was recruited into a life at nineteen by proximity and stayed out of love. She informs because the state threatens her with prison. She dies because the man who claimed to love her chose his position, and because a boss decided she was a liability.

She is killed by Silvio — the calmest, most reasonable member of the crew — which is the show's point: it isn't personal, and that's what makes it unbearable.

Drea de Matteo won the 2004 Emmy for Supporting Actress.

Afterward

Nobody in the family ever learns the truth. Christopher relapses, marries Kelli, and lives with it. Carmela asks about her for seasons afterward and is told she ran off with another man, and half-believes it.

Adriana's disappearance is one of the few things the show returns to for the rest of its run, always obliquely, always in a scene about something else.

See also