Anthony "A.J." Soprano Jr.¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Robert Iler
- Born
- 1986
- Diagnosed
- Panic attacks; later clinical depression
- Fate
- Alive; a development job in film production, arranged by his father
It's all a big nothing. A.J., quoting his grandmother
The most disliked character in the series and, on rewatch, one of the best-written.
The inheritance¶
A.J. gets his father's condition and none of his father's capability.
The panic attacks arrive in season three, at Jackie Aprile Jr.'s funeral — the same age Tony was when his started. It's the show's clearest statement that this is hereditary and that Tony has passed on the one thing he'd have chosen not to.
What he doesn't inherit is the toughness. He is not violent, not cunning, not commanding. He tries at various points to be a gangster — a half-hearted attempt at torching a man's lawn, a plan to attack Junior with a knife — and can't. He tries school, the army, club management, and each fails on contact.
And crucially, nobody wants him in the business. Tony is adamant. Carmela is adamant. The one thing both parents agree on is that A.J. must stay out — which leaves him with an identity built entirely around being kept away from the only thing his family respects.
"It's all a big nothing"¶
At a funeral, Livia tells her grandson that in the end you die in your own arms and it's all a big nothing.
He remembers it. Years later, doing a Yeats poem for school and reading about the world's collapse, it lands, and he goes into a depression that isn't adolescent posturing.
Season six gives him a genuine political awakening — he becomes agitated about terrorism, war, and climate, in a household that finds all of it embarrassing — and the show is careful to make him right about the facts and useless at doing anything with them.
The pool¶
In "The Second Coming" (S6E84), A.J. attempts suicide in the family pool, weighted with a cinder block and a rope too long to work.
Tony pulls him out and holds him, both of them soaked, A.J. sobbing that he's sorry.
It's Gandolfini's rawest scene in the series, and it's the one place the show lets Tony be nothing but a father. The pool is also where the ducks were, in episode one.
Why he's the cruellest creation¶
Because the show refuses to let him be either a tragedy or a joke, and keeps him mediocre.
He is a depressed, unremarkable young man who is neither redeemed nor destroyed. By the finale he has been talked out of the army, given a job in film development through his father's connections, and bought an SUV. He's at the table at Holsten's, mildly cheered up.
The last thing Tony says to him is that he should remember the good times — a line Tony half-remembers from Livia and gets wrong.
A.J. is what the family produces, and the honest thing the show does is not make it dramatic.
Robert Iler¶
Cast at 13. He was arrested in 2001 in a robbery incident and pleaded to a lesser charge, receiving probation, at the same time as playing a character in trouble — something the production handled quietly.
He largely left acting after the series, played poker professionally for a period, and now co-hosts a Sopranos rewatch podcast with Jamie-Lynn Sigler.