Thursday, March 9, 2006

DAMN IT FEELS GOOD TO BE A GANGSTA. NOT: What happens to an actor on The Sopranos after the decision is made to have him whacked? The WaPo's David Segal investigates. Remember the death of Gigi Cestone? The actor, John Fiore, was not amused to receive that call from Sopranos creator David Chase:
Fiore did what anyone confronting a killer would do -- he begged for his life.

"I said no, no, no, you do not have to do this," he recalls. "You do not have to do this. You are the writer, you are the producer. This is [bunk]. Kill somebody else!"

Chase was apologetic but unmoved. Nothing personal. It's just what the story demands.

Easing into the acceptance stage of death, Fiore asked how he would expire, and suddenly the news went from merely awful to absurdly awful. "At first," he says, "I thought it was a really bad joke."

It wasn't. Chase wanted Fiore's character to die of a heart attack on the toilet. On the toilet. No machine-gun ambush, like Sonny Corleone, murdered at a tollbooth in "The Godfather." No, for Gigi Cestone, it'd be a coronary on the throne. Does it get more humiliating?

"It was highly disagreeable to me," says Fiore, who sounds surprisingly bitter, five years after leaving the show. "But David said, 'No, this is memorable, this is different.' " So Fiore sucked it up, died on cue, and on his last day, the cast and crew handed him a signed toilet seat, which he didn't find very amusing. A year or so later, he ran into Chase, who asked if the "Sopranos" stint had helped his career.

"I said, actually, it didn't help me at all. And my kids have to listen to people in school say, 'Ha ha, your dad died on the toilet.' "

Favorite Sopranos death, anyone?

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