Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri¶

At a glance¶

Played by: Tony Sirico
Also: Billy Magnussen in The Many Saints of Newark
Position: Soldier → capo
Nickname: From a hijacked truck he believed held TVs; it held walnuts
Fate: Alive at the end of the series

You know who had an ulcer? Napoleon. And he conquered the world.

The funniest man in the series and, by a clear margin, the most consistently dangerous.

The comedy¶

Paulie is a superb comic creation: vain, superstitious, tightly wound, obsessed with hygiene, and utterly certain about things he has entirely invented. The white wings in his hair. The tracksuits. The horror of germs. A worldview assembled from half-heard facts, delivered with total authority.

His feuds are the show's best running joke — the endless dispute over who paid for what, his war with a waiter, the near-murder of an old woman over a rug.

"Pine Barrens" (S3E37) is the summit. Lost in the snow with Christopher, one shoe gone, eating frozen ketchup packets, insisting the Russian killed sixteen Czechoslovakians and was an interior decorator. It is the funniest hour the show made and it is also a study of two men who would eat each other.

The danger¶

The joke is that Paulie is a clown. The show is careful to remind you what he actually is.

He murders casually and often. He smothers a friend's elderly mother during a robbery. He kills a waiter over a perceived slight about a tip. His body count is among the highest in the series, and most of it is over nothing — money, disrespect, inconvenience.

He also spends season four in prison in Youngstown, sulking that nobody is paying his legal bills, and comes closer than anyone realizes to defecting to Johnny Sack — an act of near-treason he backs away from and never pays for.

The fear¶

The best writing for the character is about death. Paulie is terrified of it in a way none of the others are.

His mother turns out not to be his mother — she's his aunt — which detonates his sense of self in his sixties. He has a cancer scare. He becomes convinced he's being haunted by the Russian, and by the old woman he killed, and consults a psychic who names his victims on live television.

His response to a Catholic upbringing that promises hell is not reform. It's a $50,000 payment to a church and a demand for a better afterlife arrangement, negotiated like a construction contract.

Surviving¶

Paulie is one of very few crew members alive at the end. In "Made in America," Tony offers him the Cifaretto crew; Paulie hesitates, citing a run of bad luck attached to it, then accepts.

The show's last real image of him is sitting outside Satriale's in the sun, watching a stray cat, as an orange cat that has been staring at Christopher's photograph regards him. Whether the cat means anything is exactly the kind of question the series enjoys not answering.

Tony Sirico¶

Sirico had a genuine criminal record — multiple arrests, a stretch in Sing Sing — before turning to acting after a prison drama group visited. He reportedly agreed to the role on one condition: Paulie could never be a rat.

The hair was his own. So was much of the physical business. He died on July 8, 2022, aged 79. He is one of 27 actors who appear in both Goodfellas and The Sopranos.