Michael Gandolfini watched dad James Gandolfini on The Sopranos for the first time before auditioning for The Many Saints of Newark

Vanity Fair

“My dad didn’t want me to see Tony Soprano—the violence, the angry, the mean," says the actor, who was born in 1999, the year The Sopranos premiered. "Of course I was on set and would visit him in his trailer, but I had never watched the show…. I never knew Tony Soprano. I only knew my dad.” But Michael Gandolfini decided to start watching the HBO drama before auditioning for its prequel movie directed by creator David Chase. “It was really hard to watch my dad,” he says. “I recorded four hours of his monologues with Melfi and walked around New York with them constantly, constantly, constantly playing in my ear.” As for his three-month casting process, Gandolfini says: "I had this unspoken trust that David wasn’t going to cast me if there was even a shred that this isn’t going to work.”