Corrado "Junior" Soprano¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Dominic Chianese
- Also
- Corey Stoll in The Many Saints of Newark
- Relation
- Johnny Boy's brother; Tony's uncle
- Position
- Boss, DiMeo family (nominal, from S1)
- Fate
- Dementia; a state psychiatric facility; alive at the end
I've got the *ability*. That's what I've got.
The arrangement¶
When Jackie Aprile Sr. dies, Tony engineers a compromise: Junior gets the title, Tony keeps the earners. Junior is to be the public boss — the name on the indictment, the man the FBI watches — while real authority sits with his nephew.
Junior knows. That's the whole problem. He is old-school, proud, and acutely aware that he is being managed by a man he changed the diapers of, and the humiliation curdles fast.
Fed by Livia — a stream of observations about Tony's disrespect, his therapy, his loose mouth — Junior orders his nephew killed in season one. The attempt fails. He spends the next six seasons under house arrest, on trial, or increasingly confined, and never regains real power.
The comedy¶
Chianese plays him as the funniest tragic figure in the series. Junior's vanity is enormous and entirely unearned. He sings. He complains about his portions. He conducts a running feud with a neighbour over a hedge. His catalogue of grievances stretches back to the 1950s and he can produce any item on request.
The season one plot in which Junior's reputation is destroyed because word gets out that he performs oral sex on his girlfriend — a thing he considers so shameful that he dumps her for mentioning it — is both very funny and a precise piece of anthropology about the culture the show depicts.
The decline¶
Season six is where the character turns genuinely sad. Junior's dementia advances past management, and in "Members Only" (S6E66) he shoots Tony in the stomach — believing him to be "Little Pussy" Malanga, a man from decades earlier.
There is no revenge available. The person who did it doesn't exist any more.
Tony's last visit, near the end of the series, is one of its bleakest scenes. Junior doesn't know him. Tony tries to make him remember that he and his brother ran North Jersey — that he was somebody — and Junior, mildly interested, says that's nice.
He ends the series in a state facility, harmless, with no memory of anything he did, having outlived almost everyone.
Dominic Chianese¶
A distinguished stage actor and singer before the series — and, notably, Johnny Ola in The Godfather Part II, which makes his casting here a piece of deliberate lineage. He sings on screen more than once; the performance of "Core 'ngrato" at Bobby's wake is genuine.
He was 68 when the show began.