There are arguably few routes less glamorous than that which snakes westward from the Lincoln Tunnel to the New Jersey Turnpike and on to Newark. (Carbon-monoxide vibes!) Unless you’re a fan of “The Sopranos,” in which case that gray path takes on a mythic quality. “We should be playing the song,” the actor Alessandro Nivola said on a recent morning, as his car sped past the industrial chimneys of North Jersey, just as Tony Soprano’s does in the opening credits of the show. Nivola began to sing the first bars of the theme—a morning, a gun—unshowily but with conviction.
Nivola, who is forty-nine, was wearing jeans and a gray button-down, and a heavy silver I.D. bracelet. Next month, he will star in the movie “The Many Saints of Newark,” a “Sopranos” prequel, co-written by the show’s creator, David Chase, and directed by Alan Taylor. In the crime drama, which is set against the backdrop of the 1967 Newark race riots, Nivola plays Dickie Moltisanti, father to Christopher (a baby in the movie), and mentor to the young Tony (played by Michael Gandolfini, the son of the late James Gandolfini, who starred in the series as the psychologically tortured Mafia boss). Although Nivola is part Italian, his background is not Moltisanti-esque. “My grandfather, who was a sculptor, was originally from Sardinia, and he moved to New York in the forties,” Nivola said. “Him and my grandmother lived a kind of bohemian existence in Greenwich Village, which is where my dad was born, and it wasn’t exactly the mean streets of the outer boroughs.” Nivola’s father tried to hide his heritage: “In boarding school, he changed his name from Pietro to Pete.” He went on, “But, by the time I was born, he’d rediscovered his Italianness, and I was saddled with the most Italian name in history.”
To prepare for the role of Dickie, a mafioso whose charisma conceals a jumble of violent and tender urges, Nivola spent months with a dialect coach. (“Almost everyone can at this point do the ‘Goodfellas’ imitation, you know”—his voice slid briefly into gabagool territory—“and I wanted to get much more specific than that.”) He also worked with a trainer. (“It’s never mentioned in the movie, but I figured, like a lot of those guys, Dickie might have been a boxer as a kid, and I changed my body quite a lot, to look more imposing.”) He immersed himself in the culture, reading books about Newark and exploring local landmarks. Now he wanted to revisit one, the Museum of the Old First Ward, a modest space housed on the grounds of St. Lucy’s Church.
On his phone, Nivola pulled up an image, taken on his previous visit, of a stained-glass window donated to St. Lucy’s by Richie (the Boot) Boiardo, the mid-century Mob boss whose crime family, David Chase once said, loosely inspired “The Sopranos.” “Originally, the Boot lived in Newark,” Nivola said. “Later, he moved to this amazing estate out in Livingston, after he mysteriously came into a lot of money.” A church secretary, having heard about Nivola’s new movie, approached. “They filmed a scene from the show at my house—where Uncle Junior is losing it, and he comes, in his pajamas, to a neighbor’s door to ask for ice cream,” she told him. “My son was really excited—they gave him a director’s chair.”
Bob Cascella, a retired probation officer who has been entrusted with curating the museum, wasn’t far behind. “Are you the son?” he asked.
“No, I play Dickie Moltisanti,” Nivola said.
“The father came here once,” Cascella went on, undeterred. “I said to him, ‘Hi, Tony!’ And he laughed. I guess he was doing research.” He ushered Nivola into the basement, where every inch of wall was covered with photo displays. “I call them ‘concepts,’ ” Cascella said. “I’m not trained. I don’t know, but that’s what I call them.” He began his First Ward spiel: wedding ceremonies (“I tell people, ‘You don’t need to be married in St. Lucy’s to get on this wall, you just need to have one of the couple be from the Ward!’ ”), social clubs, feast days, doo-wop groups (“Here’s Pesci in one of them. He really paid his dues. Did you know he was a hair stylist?”). At a display featuring pictures of Boiardo, Cascella paused. “I grew up with people like on ‘The Sopranos,’ and they weren’t looked down on by any means,” he said. “Most of the guys, they don’t bother anybody. They live on the same block, they’re going around. My mother used to bet with one guy, a bookie—he used to take numbers from her! If you get money from them and you don’t pay it back, what do you expect? It’s business!” Cascella laughed, and Nivola joined, a little faintly. “Now, the killers, guys who are real nuts, that’s a different thing. Like what’s-his-name on the show. Ralphie? The one who killed his pregnant girlfriend.” (A harrowing plot point from Season 3.) “Now that was a nut. But most of the kids in this neighborhood, they could have been like Tony. Or they could have been like me.” ♦
