{"id":41449,"date":"2018-07-25T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-07-25T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/25yearslatersite.com\/?p=41449"},"modified":"2026-08-14T03:13:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T03:13:41","slug":"frank-santorelli-discusses-his-role-on-the-sopranos-working-with-james-gandolfini-tony-sirico-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/?p=41449","title":{"rendered":"Frank Santorelli Discusses His Role on The Sopranos, Working with James Gandolfini, Tony Sirico & More!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with actor Frank Santorelli about his role as Georgie in The Sopranos. This was an enjoyable conversation where Frank gave me interesting insight as to what it was like to work on one of the greatest television shows of all time. I hope you enjoy our conversation.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The Audition Process<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I\u2019m a stand-up comic by trade, and I worked out of Boston. So right around \u201985, I moved from Cleveland, Ohio to Boston to do stand-up because the comedy scene is so huge there. So off of that, people would see us on stage, commercial agents, and then I went to New York to do stand-up and from there I got an agent and a manager.\u00a0 Years ago, they used to be two different things. Now they can be one. Anyway, I got an agent from my stand-up, and I started auditioning for commercials and then slowly but surely that mutated into going in to audition for other stuff. It was 1998 when I auditioned for that show (The Sopranos<\/em>) I got an audition, and nobody knew anything about it at that point. They were looking for a bartender or a bouncer. Television and movies are a visual medium first, so you have to be physically right for it if you’re going to get. I was like 6 two and a half and almost 300 lbs. when I walked in there.<\/p>\n

I went in and Georgianne Walken, Christopher Walken\u2019s wife, has her own casting agency and that\u2019s where I went. I introduced myself and she brought me into this room, and there was James Gandolfini and David Chase. I can’t remember if anybody else is in the room, but I didn’t know either of those guys.\u00a0I did know Gandolfini was in Crimson Tide<\/em> and maybe something else, True Romance<\/em>.\u00a0I didn’t really know him though.\u00a0Anyway, I went in and auditioned. It was the scene on the phone where I said, \u201chello, hello hello hello.\u201d \u00a0I stopped, and I said, \u201cIf I get this, I\u2019m going to need some more lines.\u201d The only person that laughed initially was Georgianne Walken. She just roared. I\u2019m a comedian, so I kind of know what\u2019s funny, and they all started laughing, and I thought, \u201cI got them.\u201d The role was actually just supposed to be a day player, meaning one day of work. About a week later I get a call from my agent and he says, \u201cYou know that Soprano thing? You got that\u201d.<\/p>\n

One day, one shooting day in Jersey at The Bada Bing, which was The Satin Dolls, a real strip club, probably about 20 minutes from Manhattan. \u00a0The guy that owned the club thought he died and went to heaven. It went from being a sleazy little strip club to being world famous within a decade.\u00a0 They actually just tore it down, six months ago. Improper business practices, running prostitutes out the back, gambling. All the shit that was happening on The Sopranos<\/em> was going on for real there. Even in the foyer there, you could buy G-Strings and hats. If you had gone there, you would be blown away because the foyer was huge and they were selling merch like crazy. Anyway, I was just supposed to be there one day.<\/p>\n

Becoming a Reoccurring Character<\/h2>\n

While I was there shooting,\u00a0I was goofing around. I can bounce things on my nose. I was sort of wiping the bar down like I lived there like I was already working there.\u00a0I think it was Terence Winter who came up to me afterward and said, \u201cYou did a great job,\u201d and I said, \u201c Thank you very much\u201d and that was it.\u00a0I left, and they called me for the next episode and then another, and they would call me up like the Mob and say you\u2019re in the next episode. I didn’t have a contract like other people had contracts. It ended up being 13 episodes over the course of six seasons and I averaged like two episodes to a season.\u00a0Here\u2019s the thing with show business. If you’re easy to work with and you know what you\u2019re doing, and you’re not a pain in the butt, they will hire you again.<\/p>\n

The Cast<\/h2>\n

I can tell you a long-winded story, but it would take all night, but Gandolfini came up and hugged me and got ink all over him from my tattoos. It was funny; we hit it off right away. He said to me, “You did a good job, man, you did a good job,” and they thought I was going to be gone. When I came back for the next episode, Paulie Walnuts, Tony Sirico, he sees me, and you know he’s a real actor. I’m not saying I’m not a real actor, but I’m a comedian really and the acting stuff is on the side. Some of these guys really didn’t like when they heard I was a stand-up.\u00a0 Like how does a stand-up comedian get on a show like this? \u00a0I was introduced to Tony Sirico right at the beginning and I shake his hand, he says, \u201cHow you doing?\u201d and that was it. Now he sees me like, and it’s got to be a month later, maybe like six weeks later because it’s like a month to shoot the whole episode. He sees me and says, \u201cYou must have done something right.\u201d We became friends over the next four years. Not friends but you know he came to see me once in Brooklyn. I was in this terrible show called The Sopranos Last Supper<\/em>\u00a0where I was playing Georgie, and they were beating me up, and he came to the show.\u00a0I was blown away. I was actually talking to him on the phone every once in a while. Same thing with Big Puss, Vincent Pastore. I’m friends with him and John Fiore who played Gigi, who died on the toilet. He lives in Medford right down the street from me. We hang out. We make appearances as Gigi and Georgie.<\/p>\n

Maybe like two years later, after I was already on the show already, somebody ran into Tony Sirico, a friend of mine and they said, “Hey you know Frank Santorelli, he plays Georgie? \u00a0Tony says, \u201cFrankie, he’s a good boy.\u201d He liked me because I wasn’t a pain and I wasn\u2019t arrogant. There was one episode when I get hit in the face with a chain by Ralphie. He pokes me with the pool stick first. He jabs me with it, and I take it. I just I instinctively took it away from him and put it against the wall and said, \u201cCut it out, that f*cking hurts.\u201d\u00a0 Tony Sirico came up to me and said, “You played it perfectly.” I said, \u201cI did?\u201d He said, \u201cyeah, because if you make a move towards him, he’s a made guy, and you\u2019re alligator food the next day.\u201d That was interesting to hear. He was, you know, the real deal. Of all those people on that show\u2026I don’t want to say he was connected, let’s just say he knew people (laughs). He was a great guy. I don’t talk to him at all today. But Big Puss and John Fiore I do keep in touch with. I did a New Year’s Eve show with Big Puss at the Catch a Rising Star in Lincoln, Rhode Island. I did stand up, and he came out going, \u201cWhat the f*ck, you know? You wanna see the ball drop?\u201d then he starts unbuckling his pants. That was hilarious. I did a couple of New Year’s Eves in a row with him, and I’ve done a couple of plays with him and he’s a great guy.<\/p>\n

\"Georgie

Georgie and Ralphie from Season 3’s “University”<\/p><\/div>\n

On Set Memories<\/h2>\n

Gandolfini was always with the scripts. He wasn’t you know, into busting chops — he had too much to do, too much to remember.\u00a0He wasn’t someone I could come up to and just start telling jokes to.\u00a0The set was very, very tough. What they call coverage, which means one scene with me saying \u201cHey Tony, the guy is on line 2\u201d, they would shoot it from six different angles. Everything. Everything they did they get from 9, 10, 12 different angles, so they had complete and utter what they called coverage of everything that’s going on. So that when they go into the editing room they’ve got everything.<\/p>\n

I didn’t hang out with any of those guys. I came in to do the read through and I would drive back to Boston. There was nothing else to do but read through the scripts, but everybody was there though which was kind of cool.\u00a0It was a big square set up, and there was literally 150 people sitting around in a big square and everybody would introduce themselves and say, \u201cMy name is Frank, I play Georgie.\u201d \u00a0\u201cMy name is Jim, and I play Tony Soprano.\u201d One by one everybody would say who they were and then we read through it.<\/p>\n

Other than the read-throughs, it was shooting and then we eat. I actually ate with David Chase and James Gandolfini once. One time they actually came over to me and sat down. I was all by myself, and they came over and said we heard you do stand-up, we want to come to see you. I said, “I’m in the Village at a place called the Boston Comedy Club.” I told them that it\u2019s kind of an earthy, granola kinda place, and Gandolfini says, \u201cWhat, I’ve got to wear a f*cking beret?\u201d He did ask me one night to go out and party with him but I couldn’t because I was driving back to Boston with John Fiore. We had to get back home.<\/p>\n

There was so much work to do. They didn’t ask me if I knew my lines.\u00a0They would have replaced me like a light bulb if I didn’t know what the hell I was going.\u00a0Like I said, Gandolfini was all by himself. He was with his scripts and had people running lines with them all the time.\u00a0It was always hot because we couldn’t run the air conditioner in the Bing. The air conditioner would mess with the sound. Everybody was sweating including the strippers — totally hot (laughs<\/em>).\u00a0Everybody’s sweating and girls are sliding down poles, and there’s 50 people sitting around the bar and the tech crew and hanging lights and it was 120 degrees in there—it was so hot.\u00a0When we stopped shooting, they’d run the air conditioner but it never really never did anything.<\/p>\n

People would see me on set and go, \u201cHey Georgie!\u201d and they knew I was going to get beat up. I got beat up with a phone, a cash register drawer, one of those singing fish. I got beat up a whole bunch of different ways; I got beat up at the Christopher Columbus rally.\u00a0They were hanging the effigy of Christopher Columbus. Those were real American Indians that were there, and they were unhappy because they don’t like Columbus. He was a slave trader, and that’s what they’re saying about him, but I have no idea. I’m not a history buff.\u00a0That scene was funny because a friend of mine said here I am watching this iconic TV show, and then you come on the screen, and you ruined it for me (laughs<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Georgie’s Tattoos<\/h2>\n

The tattoos took five hours to put on. I had to go there early before everybody. I was there at 5 am for a noon shoot because it takes so long to put them on. They had to be put on the same way every time. David (Chase) came in and said \u201cPut some tattoos on this guy\u201d and then left. Well, she [makeup] just went crazy. At the end of that first shooting day, David Chase came in the makeup trailer and said to take a picture of the tattoos.\u00a0When he left, she said, \u201cThis is huge.\u201d I said, “why?” She said that means you might come back. I\u2019m like, you’re kidding me. She says no why would else would he have me take a picture of your tattoos?\u00a0Sure enough, she was right. I had to go in there five hours early because they had to put them on exactly the same way. She just was flying by the seat of her pants in the very beginning, not thinking she was going to have to do it again.\u00a0She had to draw them on with pen and ink; there were stencils for the Chinese writing, lightning bolts, Celtic crosses.\u00a0There was a lot of preparation for that. I would leave home at midnight and drive all night to Jersey and it would take me about five and a half, six hours, and I drove up to the makeup trailer and go in, and they would already be there at 5 am, waiting for me.<\/p>\n

What The Sopranos Means to Him<\/h2>\n

It was an honor to me to be involved, to be cast. Everyone in that show was incredible. Right now, I\u2019m still going on that. That is the best thing that I\u2019ve done at this point and the most screen time that I\u2019ve had. I got to be a part of the greatest TV show ever, the last TV show that everyone dropped everything to get home to see when it came on.<\/p>\n

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I recently had the pleasure of speaking with actor Frank Santorelli about his role as Georgie in The Sopranos. This was an enjoyable conversation where Frank gave me interesting insight as to what it was like to work on one of the greatest television shows of all time. I hope you enjoy our conversation.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[17,292],"class_list":["post-41449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-hbo","tag-the-sopranos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41449"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299041,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41449\/revisions\/299041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}