'Gandolfini was wonderful – but not without problems'

For six seasons, Steve Schirripa and Michael Imperioli lived at the heart of 'The Sopranos'. Decades on, they speak to Annabel Nugent about the show's legacy, James Gandolfini, and what Tony Soprano's mobsters would've made of Trump

- Annabel Nugent

It’s strange to think that had things been different, there might’ve been a seventh season of The Sopranos – that in another world, David Chase’s ambitious, mean mob opera, and with it James Gandolfini’s ambitious, mean mobster Tony Soprano, could have returned to screens one last time. “There was talk of us coming back,” says Michael Imperioli, whose performance as Tony’s problem nephew Christopher won him an Emmy. It was around 2012, five years after the show wrapped, that the idea of a reboot was first floated.

“There was even talk at one point of us doing a prequel, like with us in it - which given our age didn’t really make any sense,” says Imperioli from the dark alcove of a hotel room somewhere. “I remember Jim was like, ‘What are we gonna do? Wear wigs and girdles like Star Trek?’” He laughs to himself, lost in the memory. “Yeah, I remember Jim saying that.”

Any chance of a reunion would be stamped out for good when Gandolfini died aged 51 of a heart attack a year later. “I think he would have gone for it for the right price and the right script but then he passed away - and without Jim it didn’t make sense,” adds Steve Schirripa on a separate call, Zooming in from home where behind him today are a raft of framed photographs - some of him in character as Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, the mob’s most domesticated soldier, and others of him alongside Clint Eastwood, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Tony Danza, and Tony Bennett.

And so, barring a spin-off movie that starred none of the original cast - 2021’s The Many Saints of Newark - The Sopranos remains preserved as a singular moment in time: six seminal seasons of complicated and clever television that have proven rich enough to justify decades of discussion. Not least on