Will Uncle Junior sing?

When you say you "went up," what does that mean?

I couldn't remember the guy's name. Because Coppola was getting me nervous. I didn't realize this was the director's technique, I had no idea. So, I try it again. At one point, Pacino gets up and walks away. And I said, "Oh my God, is this the end of my acting career?" And Al comes back and says, "No Dominic. No, no, it's not you. Don't worry about it." Coppola changed the name purposely, to get me a little edgy, and it worked. Believe me it worked. It worked very well. I learned a lot about film acting in that moment. Later, the door opens, and Michael Corleone's son is there in his white communion suit, looking just like me when I was a kid. [This bit does not appear in the finished film.] And I looked at the kid and I raised my eyebrow maybe one hundredth of a fraction higher than I had before, and Coppola said, "Cut! You did something different with your eyebrow." In film, the good directors, they're always watching you, closely.

Did you have a friendship with Pacino?

Yes.

Was he partly responsible for you appearing in "Dog Day Afternoon"?

Oh, he introduced me to Sidney Lumet [who directed the film]. And I did three movies with Sidney. He is a great director. He used me as a mobster and as a judge. And, let's see, he used me as a regular, normal man, this sensible guy who was Al Pacino's father, in "Dog Day Afternoon." I just had one line, looking at a TV set. Al is robbing the bank and I look over and say, "Why rob a bank when you got a sucker for a mother?" I knew, with that line and with Sidney, it would be a great experience. Sidney worked with me alone on the scene, and it turned out well, and I knew then that acting in films was gonna be a career for me.

Your friendship with Pacino has gone all the way up to his recent documentary, "Looking for Richard."

Yes. I did "Richard III" with him on Broadway, and we toured with it; I think we went to Boston, Philadelphia...

Your Shakespearean background must have come in handy when you were doing "The Sopranos," because it, too, is about power lust, and money lust, and just plain lust -- all the things in those history plays. How did "The Sopranos" come about for you?

Georgianne Walken, the casting director, knew my work for years. I had done HBO's "Gotti" two years before that with Armand Assante and had a wonderful scene in there. And when I read for David Chase, I knew that he liked the audition, 'cause he laughed. He didn't laugh out loud -- writers don't laugh out loud, you know -- but he snickered. I knew it was real. He's a good writer. And I saw a character, a real character, in Uncle Junior.

What was the nub of that character for you?

I didn't know how it was going to progress. But when I auditioned, doing a scene between Junior and Livia, I did know that he was talking about family. He was talking about his nephew, and there was a definite relationship with this woman, Livia, who is his sister-in-law, so it was a friendly kind of thing. I used my own family, my own memories, to help bring the character out. Basically, it's what every actor does. For example, when you see Junior driving Livia in his car. The way Junior drives [Chianese positions his arms like an aging boxer protecting his body] -- an uncle of mine drove like that. I played Junior old, almost like a kind of wimp. But then, when I started to look at him as a man in his position, a capo, I gave him a kind of swagger.

Even though he's the butt of a lot of jokes, he holds himself as if he has an idea in his head of his own importance -- to borrow from your Gilbert & Sullivan, it's as if he thinks he is the very model of an old-time Mafioso.

Yeah, it's true. I don't think Junior knows who he is.

Did David go to you and say "Here's who I think Junior is?"

David is such a great writer and I think he knew that if the casting was right he could basically leave us alone. He encouraged us, of course. He directed the first episode. He watched, he'd give the OK. For example, when I drove the car -- he knew, "That's it. That's what I want." I think we were all experimenting. There was a lot of trust and I think that helped. I have such respect for Nancy Marchand and Jimmy Gandolfini, and the respect shows. We're at ease with each other. So we can have fun, kidding around. Tony and Uncle Junior like to kid each other. We do a lot of that kind of stuff on the set. When we're on the golf course, and Tony is swinging his club and making sexual innuendo -- I didn't know how he was going to do that, when he was going to swing his club. I could have killed him! There's a good feeling there.

Does that also have to do with your shared backgrounds: "my granddad did this" and "my granddad did that?"

The cultural similarities help. When you're talking about David and Jimmy -- our grandfathers were all stonemasons. They all came from the southern part of Italy and they all worked with their hands.

David Chase gives Tony Soprano a speech about his grandfather building a church.

That comes from David's soul, I'm sure. Remember that first story I told you about? About getting off the bus for the audition? Well, I had a call last month from David Chase. He said, "Dominic, I read in the paper that you were on a bus going to Clifton, New Jersey. What were you doing there?"

"Well, we were building these two-story garden apartments."

"What year?"

"1952," I said.

And David says, "I was there. I was a baby there, in Clifton, New Jersey."

He asked me to describe the building to him. Isn't that incredible? He was there. He was like five or six years old. And he remembered the building.

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