It’s been 25 years since Edie Falco and Jamie-Lynn Sigler portrayed TV mother and daughter on The Sopranos, but their friendship has endured.
“She was my daughter before I actually had one,” Falco, 61, exclusively told Us Weekly while discussing her role in I’ll Be Right There ahead of the show’s 25th anniversary on Sunday, September 8. “She was very self-possessed and I was so impressed by her.”
Falco continued, “I remember thinking at the time, ‘No one’s gonna believe that I am her mother. They might believe that she’s my mother.’ You know, she just was very grounded. She had very strong parental figures in her life.”
Falco portrayed Carmela Soprano on the HBO series, while Sigler, now 43, played daughter Meadow. (Their onscreen family was rounded out by actors James Gandolfini and Robert Iler.)
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After The Sopranos wrapped in 2007, Falco and Sigler continued to stay in touch. According to the Nurse Jackie alum, their bond has changed “so much.”
“Here it is all these years later, she is older now than I was when I started shooting Sopranos [and] she has two kids. I have two kids. We’re two adults in the world,” Falco mused. “We had a panel recently and I looked at her speaking … I was like, ‘God, look at my daughter. Look what she’s done with it. I did a good job.’”
Falco joked that she then had a “holy crap” moment, thinking that she “lost [her] mind” since they are not actually family.
“But, I know that doesn’t go away,” Falco told Us. “Like, all the actors and actresses I’ve played parents to, there’s always a little twinge of a memory of being their mom. It’s weird.”
Falco’s Carmela has since become the pinnacle of a “mob wife” style aesthetic.
“It’s so crazy,” Falco quipped. “I imagine it will come and go like most fashion trends but what a delight ’cause I remember during the fittings — Juliette Polska was the costume designer on that — we would just laugh and laugh and laugh.”
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Falco even had “the option of taking a lot” of her show wardrobe home when The Sopranos wrapped for good.
“I was like, you know, ‘I’m good actually,’” she quipped. “[There was] not much that she wore that I will ever wear in my real life. And then, now it’s become, like, a whole thing.”
While Falco has moved on from Carmela Soprano, she is playing a different type of mother in I’ll Be Right There.
“I think Carmela’s parenting, you know, is contingent upon she knew that she’s always got her husband who provides the backbone, the security, the money and all that,” she told Us. “I think, Wanda [my character in I’ll Be Right There] feels more like me, where if you’re a single mom — she’s not a single mom — [and] the dad’s got his own family now, it’s different. The sense of all the decisions that have to be made are yours, you have to provide the finances. It’s a much larger responsibility.”
I’ll Be Right There is out now.
With reporting by Kat Pettibone
