Tony Sirico¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- July 29, 1942, Brooklyn
- Died
- July 8, 2022, aged 79
- Role
- Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri, 1999–2007
- Emmy nominations
- 0 — one of the show's stranger omissions
- Before
- Goodfellas, Bullets Over Broadway, and a long record
Before¶
Sirico's biography is the one everybody knows and it's substantially true: a Brooklyn upbringing, a long string of arrests — the commonly cited figure is around 28 — and a stretch in Sing Sing for a felony conviction.
He has said the turn came inside, when a group of ex-convict actors performed at the prison and he recognized both the work and the possibility. He started acting in his thirties.
His early film career was almost entirely gangsters, including Tony Stacks in Goodfellas — one of 27 actors appearing in both that film and this series — and a long working relationship with Woody Allen (Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry).
The condition¶
The story, repeated by Sirico and confirmed by production, is that he agreed to play Paulie on one condition: the character could never become an informant.
Given his own history and his standing in his own neighborhood, this was not a vanity clause. Chase agreed. Paulie flirts with disloyalty — he comes genuinely close to defecting to Johnny Sack in season four — but never wears a wire and never talks, and is one of the few crew members alive at the end.
The performance¶
The hair was his own, including the white wings, which he maintained personally and which nobody was permitted to touch.
Much of the physical business is his: the fastidiousness, the walk, the way he handles a coffee cup, the horror of a germ. Chase and the writers built the character around what Sirico brought and then wrote to it, which is why Paulie is simultaneously the show's biggest comic creation and its most casually lethal figure.
He was never nominated for an Emmy, which is among the more baffling facts in the show's awards record.
After¶
The Sopranos made him. He voiced characters on Family Guy and Lilyhammer — the latter alongside Steven Van Zandt — and appeared in Wonder Wheel.
He died on July 8, 2022, aged 79. Michael Imperioli's public tribute noted that he was as good a friend as he was a scene partner, and that he'd been extremely generous about it for twenty-five years.