While a portion of the fans are still angry about how The Sopranos ended, almost everyone agrees that the bulk of the series simultaneously has some of the most hilarious and heartbreaking moments in television history. Even the show's most notoriously unanswered questions have made it so beloved. But it's the brutal (and inevitable) deaths of some of the most thought-after characters that really captived fans.
Many of the cast members from The Sopranos have gone on to other projects, but most can't live down their roles on the HBO hit show. This is certainly true of Drea de Matteo thanks to her portrayal of Adriana, Christopher's girlfriend turned 'rat'. Her death in the twelfth episode of Season Five, at the hands of Silvio, was just brutal. And it took a toll on the writer. Here's the truth about Adriana's demise...
A Graphic Death For Adriana Was Too Hard For The Writer
In an interview with Deadline, writer Terry Winter discussed the memorable death in "Long Term Parking". There's no doubt that the scene itself was emotionally tough for fans who had built a connection with Adriana despite the fact that she was forced to turn on Christopher and Tony. The scene was always supposed to be somewhat ambiguous. At least, in terms of not showing the most violent parts and only hearing them. This is because it was just too tough for Terry to write it. He had written numerous gory scenes throughout his time on the show, but this one was just too much.
"I scripted it that he pulls her out of the car and then the camera lingers on the car and you hear…he sort of slaps her and then she crawls off-camera and you hear a gunshot but you never actually see Silvio shoot her," Terry Winter said to Deadline. "I remember that that led to speculation that she wasn’t really dead, and I said no, of course, she’s dead. We don’t do things like that on the show where she escaped and we find out episodes later. But when I thought about it, I said God, I think I subconsciously did not want to see Adriana and/or Drea [the actor] get shot. I just loved that character and the actress so much that I didn’t want to see it, and I didn’t think about that when I wrote it. I really didn’t. It just was the way I saw it visually in my head. And then at the end, you hear the gunshot and then camera drifts up into the sky."
While this wasn't Drea De Matteo's final scene that she shot, it was on her final day. This made the scene much harder to film. For Drea, this was a moment she worried some fans would misinterpret. In short, she didn't want fans to hate her character.
"To less sophisticated viewers, Adriana was a rat, tough guy, brassy, and then the people who really understood [creator David Chase's] writing underneath all of the externalized stuff and underneath all the gunshots, they knew who she really was," Drea De Matteo explained. "She was the innocence on the show, more so than the Soprano children, because the children were jaded. They lived a very f***ed-up existence within that household, and they were exposed to a lot of stuff. Adriana was exposed to all that stuff, she was never jaded by anything because she really came from her heart and a place of love, always. She was infantile, and she always had the purest of intentions. She wasn’t a rat. She wasn’t any of these things. She was like the sacrificial lamb."
Finding Out That She Was On The Chopping Block
Like all shows that involve a lot of death, the actors dread the day when they get a call from the series creator. After all, this usually means that their character is getting killed off and they are out of a job. However, in the case of Drea, things played out slightly differently.
"I knew by Season 5, Episode 5," Drea claimed. "David [Chase] pulled me over on a curb…I mean, the story is he usually brings everyone into their office for a sit-down and then he takes them to dinner. This did not happen for me. He told me while I was shooting the scene where I was in the neck brace. I sat on a curb with him. He said, 'We’re going to shoot this two ways, and we don’t know if…' See, I had gone to him and asked…because I knew the road was leading towards that, once they had me dealing with the FBI…am I going to be here next season? Because I wanted to direct a film. That was the biggest thing on my agenda at that time. I really wanted to make a movie; I had gone to film school. I wasn’t really an actor. So I don’t know if he was pissed that I asked because, you know, David is a funny guy when it came to whether or not he thought you were taking advantage of your position there or if whether or not you wanted to be there. There was always, like, a thing around that. Everybody was disposable."
Given Drea's desire to direct a movie, this led David Chase to believe that she didn't want to be on the show anymore. According to Drea, she told David that she very much wanted to be on the show, she just wanted to know if she'd have time to go off and direct her project.
While writer Terry Winter and David Chase always meant for Adriana to die at that moment, they did manage to shot two different endings for her just in case some of the information was leaked to the press or the public before it aired on HBO. However, due to the way in which it was shot (with the pan away) both versions were used in the episode.
"People would pay money for leaked storylines," Drea said. "So we shot it two ways. We shot it with me getting away, and we shot it with me being shot in the woods, and he ended up using both endings, within the ending."