Edie Falco calls on-screen marriage to James Gandolfini her 'longest intimate relationship'
Edie Falco has described her on-screen marriage to James Gandolfini on The Sopranos as her "longest intimate relationship".
Reflecting on her role as Carmela Soprano on the acclaimed HBO series in an interview with The Guardian, Falco admitted that her connection with Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, was very special.
"I adored Jimmy, but we didn't hang out a lot. So when I looked in his face, he wasn't Jim, he was Tony," she commented, sharing that she tried to watch the series for the first time this year but only made it through four episodes.
"It was too fraught, and a big part of that is Jim," the Nurse Jackie star said of Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack in 2013 at age 51. "People die and you move on, then you see them on screen, and it is too shocking. And Jimmy and I were kids then! Neither of us knew what we were doing, but we worked in the same way, not preparing, but like kids in a sandbox. Aida (Turturro) and I watched a few episodes and I said, 'This is killing me.'"
Elsewhere in the chat, Falco discussed her home life growing up on Long Island, New York, where she was the second of four children to two creative parents.
"There was very little about my upbringing that was conventional. We had two creatively minded young people trying to make a family, so we really grew up feral," she said, adding that her parents divorced and got back together multiple times. "My mother had (another) husband in between, so there was a lot of chaos."
Falco, who has never married and independently adopted two children, was asked if the environment in her house impacted her decision to stay single.
"That's it. But I've been in therapy since time began, so I can look on my childhood now with such love. It was a bunch of people really, really trying," the actress replied.
