‘The Sopranos’ at 25: Robert Iler’s Portrayal Of AJ Soprano Never Got The Recognition It Deserved

Tony Soprano is not a sweet guy. That’s the whole point of The Sopranos in the end. The man is too miserable, too resentful, too narcissistic, too deceitful, and too prone to violence to make any lasting meaningful change in his life or the lives of those around them. He’s an emotional abuser, a thief, a swindler, a mass murderer. As Dr. Jennifer Melfi realizes, or pretends to realize after being embarrassed about it by her friends at a dinner party, such people can’t “I really care about ducks and horses” their way out of it. This is who they are. 

This is the sound of Tony Soprano, briefly, being someone else.

“Alright. Are you alright? Alright. Come here. Come on. Turn around. Come on, baby. You’re alright, baby. You’re alright, baby. You’re alright. You’re alright.”

If there’s a single scene in The Sopranos guaranteed to make me cry every time (there are several, but this is the one), it’s the suicide attempt of AJ Soprano, Tony’s failson and namesake (in “The Second Coming,” Season 6 Episode 19). Genetically predisposed to depression, driven to despair by the dismal state of the world, and emotionally broken when his fiancée suddenly breaks things off over concerns about his wealthy lifestyle, AJ gives up. 

Then he gives up on giving up, realizing about one second into his very serious attempt to drown himself in the backyard pool that he does not want to do this at all. Unfortunately he’s tied himself to a cinderblock, can’t reach the side of the pool, and is fully dressed in frigid temperatures, making treading water a herculean task. Only Tony’s fortuitous arrival saves him. And after the initial angry bluster passes, and Tony unconsciously reverts to being a young father cradling his infant son in his arms, you could be forgiven for thinking AJ has saved Tony, too. 

The focus in this scene tends to be on James Gandolfini, which is understandable: The focus in any scene in which James Gandolfini appears tends to be on James Gandolfini. But I want to draw attention to the sound behind his heartrending dialogue, the noise that draws out the single sincerest display of love and tenderness we get out of Tony Soprano during all seven seasons: The high-pitched, bottomed-out, absolutely hopeless sobbing of Robert Iler as AJ. 

That’s a sound I recognize, much more than I recognize Tony’s depressive bouts of angry, fuck-the-world self-pity and outbursts of explosive, physically dangerous rage. (To be fair, I am a bit familiar with the self-pity, but fortunately not the rage.) Like the Sopranos, who as suburban Italian New Jerseyites are sort of the Bizarro version of my own suburban Irish Long Islanders, I too am genetically predisposed to depression. I recognize how the one-two-three punch of turmoil in your personal life, awareness of the world’s horrors, and the garbage genes you’ve inherited can make your life a miserable slog for weeks, months, years at a time. 

But I don’t think I’ve recognized the worst of my depressed self on screen until I rewatched The Sopranos last year and saw the work Iler did throughout the show’s final episodes. Watching him stare at cartoons he doesn’t enjoy watching, or argue with his therapist that there is in fact no hope, or fixate on a work of art that disturbs him and perseverate on it until it’s like a form of brain damage…yeah, that’s me depressed alright. 

It all culminates in those reedy, wailing sobs on the side of the pool, sopping wet, his father’s hands upon him. I’ve heard those sobs, heard them from my own lungs as I curled up in a fetal position on the bed or the couch or the bathroom floor, convinced nothing will ever be good again. I don’t know where Iler dug that up from — I’m not sure I want to know — but you’d have to turn to Sheryl Lee on Twin Peaks to find a peer-level performance of psychological agony in the form of crying on camera. That despair, and the audience’s desperate human need to console it, is what makes Gandolfini’s words work in that moment. It’s what makes the whole storyline work, and it’s a key storyline at that: Here at the end of the series, it shows what the world made by men like Tony does to people.

Until an early-2010s casting bonanza rendered such complaints largely outdated  — Kiernan Shipka on Mad Men, Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner on Game of Thrones, and Holly Taylor on The Americans all proved capable of holding down tremendously demanding adult material seemingly with ease — the common rap on child actors who aged into becoming main characters was that they were kind of a waste of everyone’s time. Iler got it as bad as anyone, especially because relative to his on-screen sister, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, his best material didn’t come until much later in the series. 

But just as random Italian-American character actors like Tony Sirico, Vincent Curatola, and Steven R. Schrripa were given the material of their careers by this show and ably rose past their background-character origins to meet the challenge, so did Iler. His part is much less cool and funny and scary and glamorous than the gangsters, which is what makes it so brave. Unlike virtually everyone else on the show, he didn’t have any bedrock of thrilling criminality on which to base his performance and trust that the audience would put up with it. He just went there, all in, right into the deep end. In the process he showed me myself. It’s not a flattering portrait, but The Sopranos doesn’t show us as we wish we were. It shows us as we wish we weren’t.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.