Inside ‘The Many Saints of Newark.’ David Chase, Michael Gandolfini, Ray Liotta dish on ‘Sopranos’ prequel. – NJ.com

Michael Gandolfini was always going to be Tony Soprano — he just didn’t know it.

David Chase wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In 1999, the “Sopranos” creator launched Gandolfini’s father, James Gandolfini, into the hearts and minds of New Jerseyans from High Point to Cape May. The actor’s searing portrayal of the North Jersey mob boss forever changed TV.

Michael was born that same year.

Now, eight years after his father’s sudden death, Michael, 22, has revived Tony Soprano as a sensitive, impressionable teenager in the “Sopranos” prequel film “The Many Saints of Newark,” out Friday, Oct. 1 in theaters and on HBO Max.

Life. Death. Rebirth.

Were the strings of fate tugging at Chase when he called upon the son to take up his father’s legacy?

“The truth is there was something guiding my choices that it just had to be that way,” he says.

Chase’s feeling about Michael Gandolfini wasn’t exactly a “supernatural thing,” he tells NJ Advance Media. “I just had made up my mind that maybe from a showmanship standpoint, that was going to work.”

After all, looking at Michael, there is no question of his resemblance to his father — the smiling eyes, the face that can shift from dour to bright in an instant.

In the end, Chase’s instincts paid off. Gandolfini is drawing high praise for his Tony Soprano, a standout among the film’s heralded ensemble cast.

“I could not run out of superlatives to describe Michael,” says Chase, 76.

“If Michael had been terrible, I believe I would still have shot the movie with him and then cut the part down or something,” he says. “But he wasn’t.”

Before Michael Gandolfini stepped on set with “The Many Saints of Newark” director Alan Taylor in 2019, he had already spent years visiting “The Sopranos” set.

Except back then, he didn’t have a clue about the nature of the HBO series. But during those years, James Gandolfini carried what often seemed like the whole state on his back.

Tony Soprano had become part of the myth of New Jersey, somehow affording even the Turnpike a gritty glamour. At the same time, he was as real as Springsteen, pizza and pork roll. To this day, there are fans who think Satriale’s Pork Store is a real business.

Now that Michael Gandolfini is waiting anxiously for Jersey and the world to see “The Many Saints of Newark,” he’s noticing something else.

“I actually think I’ve come into sort of like some odd … Jersey … pride,” the actor says with a quick laugh. “Which I never thought I would have. But I feel so proud to have grown up around Jersey and be a part of something that’s so important to the state.”

Michael Gandolfini started his life in New Jersey, but had moved to California by middle school. His mother, James Gandolfini’s first wife Marcy Wudarski, lives in Los Angeles. Still, he always came back.

“I’ve mowed probably a thousand New Jersey lawns in my life when I was a kid, and my whole family lives there,” he tells NJ Advance Media.

Gandolfini’s father, who was 51 when he died, grew up in Park Ridge. His aunt lives in Westwood. His other aunt … somewhere near Park Ridge, but he can’t be sure. After all, those Bergen County towns seem to blend into one another.

“We’ve had a Shore house in Mantoloking my entire life,” says Gandolfini, listing his Jersey particulars (he lives in New York). “So I’ve gone down there since I was zero.”

But it took an audition for “The Many Saints of Newark” to get him to watch “The Sopranos” for the first time. It would be a daunting prospect for any actor, trying to inhabit a character so embedded in the pop culture consciousness as a kind of forebear to all those who came after, like Walter White in “Breaking Bad” (Bryan Cranston famously said there would be no White without Tony Soprano).

For Gandolfini, this was the role that won his father three Emmys and a Golden Globe. But coming to the series completely new, he would also be watching his dad for at least 86 hours five years after his 2013 death.

Though the pressure was certainly there, Gandolfini couldn’t let it weigh on his performance.

“I wanted to be the best actor for David, the best notetaker for Alan,” he says, “the best scene partner for Jon (Bernthal, who plays Johnny Soprano) and Vera (Farmiga, who plays Livia Soprano) and Alessandro (Nivola, who plays Dickie Moltisanti) and Corey (Stoll, who plays Junior Soprano) and Samson (Moeakiola, who plays Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero).”

Gandolfini previously played Joey Dwyer on HBO’s “The Deuce” and appeared in the film “Cherry,” released earlier this year. He’ll also be in the upcoming Ari Aster (”Hereditary,” “Midsommar”) horror-comedy movie “Disappointment Blvd.” starring Joaquin Phoenix.

The actor’s teen Tony Soprano arrives halfway through “The Many Saints of Newark” in 1971, 36 years before the adult Tony’s cut to black at Holsten’s in the series finale of “The Sopranos.”

Gandolfini embodies the future mob boss down to the way he holds his head and his teeth, thanks to some prosthetics.

“Not only was it important to study how he moves, how he talks, how his head tilts and how his eyes work, it was important to understand how he was with every single person that we see in the show,” he says.

In the first half of the film, which takes place in 1967, an 11-year-old Tony is played by actor William Ludwig.

Some of the most tender moments in the film are actually shared by Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano and his mother, Livia Soprano, played with authority and old-school Jersey flavor by Farmiga. The Oscar nominee (”Up in the Air,” “The Departed,” “The Conjuring” films) grew up in a Ukrainian enclave in Irvington and attended St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in Newark, later moving to Flemington with her family.

In “The Sopranos,” Nancy Marchand famously played Livia as one of Tony’s greatest adversaries. Age never defanged the fearsome matriarch, who simultaneously had some of the funniest and most profound lines of the series. Here she again gets on Tony’s case and scowls when a guidance counselor praises his potential. But there are also revelatory scenes showing love and trust between mother and child.

“Me and Vera spent a lot of time together, a lot of the time talking about it and sending each other clips and understanding that it’s a very complicated, very intense, very toxic relationship, but it’s all grounded in the love that they have for one another,” Gandolfini says.

The absence of Tony’s father, Johnny Soprano — both because he spends years in prison and because he isn’t all that attentive — helps shape that bond.

“Their relationship is very crucial to Tony’s upbringing because his dad’s kind of never around,” Gandolfini says.

James Gandolfini’s voice echoes over the beginning of a “Many Saints of Newark” trailer.

“When I was a kid,” Tony says, “guys like me were brought up to follow codes.”

Posters for the movie all say the same thing: “Who Made Tony Soprano.”

However, the film is more than a Tony Soprano origin story. Michael Gandolfini may be among the most eagerly anticipated parts of the film, but he plays more of a supporting role.

The lead belong to Alessandro Nivola (”Disobedience,” “American Hustle”). His character, Dickie Moltisanti, is our introduction to the Sopranos of the 1960s and the DiMeo crime family’s hold on Newark.

“It’s by far the biggest role and the most visible and high-profile project that I’ve ever been in,” Nivola, 49, tells NJ Advance Media.

During the film, Dickie, a Soprano soldier, becomes father to Christopher Moltisanti, Tony’s protege from the series (Dickie is also first cousin to the future Carmela Soprano). The character is only talked about in the show, having died when Christopher was a baby. But he looms large in the film.

The meaning of Moltisanti — “many saints” — belies his character. Dickie presents as a gallant figure, but has a mercurial personality prone to extreme violence.

Still, this volatile gangster has a soft spot for Tony.

“Chrissy isn’t born yet, and so Tony really is the son that he never had,” Nivola says.

To conduct research for the role, Nivola visited the Museum of the Old First Ward, a chronicle of the Italian roots of the neighborhood from the turn of the century to 1970, housed in the community center of St. Lucy’s Church in Newark.

The actor was delighted by photos of a young Joe Pesci and his doo-wop group, Chang Lee and the Zani-Acts, and the stained glass windows in the church donated by Genovese crime family boss Richie “The Boot” Boiardo. The Newark mobster provided inspiration for more than one fictional Mafia story — “The Sopranos” and “The Godfather” allegedly among them.

Bob Cascella, curator of the museum, knew Boiardo, among other wiseguys. He says Nivola was especially taken with a photo of another acquaintance, Bob Blaise, at an event in the ‘60s or ‘70s.

“He wanted to pattern himself after this guy,” says Cascella, 79. He also remembers James Gandolfini making a visit to the museum after “The Sopranos” was over, possibly for a film role.

Though Dickie is the film’s window into the Soprano crew of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Jon Bernthal’s Johnny Soprano heads up the “family.” Young versions of the usual suspects are all there, too, including Corey Stoll’s Junior Soprano, Samson Moeakiola’s Big Pussy Bonpensiero, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri (Billy Magnussen) and Silvio Dante (John Magaro).

Emmy winner Ray Liotta, who grew up in Union and is known for his turn as Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” becomes the latest in a long line of actors from the film to join the “Sopranos” universe. He makes a bold entrance as Dickie’s father, “Hollywood” Dick Moltisanti. He even gets in a few boisterous Henry Hill laughs. But there’s a twist to Liotta’s presence in the film.

Working with Nivola, the veteran actor couldn’t help but notice his dedication to the role.

“He had an extreme commitment, almost to the point of too much,” says Liotta, 66.

More real-life Jersey connections can be found in a gangster named Buddha, played by North Bergen comedian and podcaster Joey “CoCo” Diaz, and Carmine Cotuso, played by Oscar-winning “Green Book” writer Nick Vallelonga, who grew up in Paramus and whose father, Tony Lip (the bouncer played by Viggo Mortensen in “Green Book”), played Carmine Lupertazzi in “The Sopranos.”

At the heart of the film is the onscreen connection between Nivola and Gandolfini, one they cultivated early on. Since Nivola was cast six months before production began and Gandolfini soon after, they had time to work on their offscreen friendship with regular meals at Junior’s in downtown Brooklyn, near Nivola’s home.

“We would meet up once every couple of weeks and just have lunch together and just talk, not even necessarily about the movie so much, but just about our lives and just get to know each other so that the feeling of familiarity and affection between the two characters would read,” Nivola says.

“In a lot of the scenes we have together, it’s a very male kind of friendship where I am kind of tough on him and I give him sh-t. David Chase is so unsentimental that he would never try and telegraph the love that I feel for him and that he feels for me, so that had to kind of be there, it had to exist without us playing it.”

Nivola says it helped that Gandolfini didn’t hold back.

“He was always just so humble and open and candid about the pressure that he felt and his memories of his dad and everything that it was very easy to get to know him and to be around him,” he says.

Gandolfini’s Tony enters the story after his family has moved to the suburbs following the Newark riots of 1967. As Dickie tries to maintain the family’s hold on the city, he also attempts to mold young Tony.

“I think he has fantasizes of being a great father to him,” says Nivola, a father of two. “He knows that his own father was a terrible father and he doesn’t want to be like that, but he doesn’t have any idea how to go about it.”

In May 2019, “Many Saints of Newark” director Alan Taylor, David Chase and hundreds of background actors converged on downtown Newark to film scenes depicting the Newark riots, also called the Newark Rebellion.

An armored vehicle rolled by as actors played local residents running through the streets, state troopers and National Guardsmen. Storefronts were made over to look like ‘60s shops, with their would-be merchandise littering the ground.

Real Newark residents watched on the sidelines, from day to night, as Taylor filmed on Branford Place near Hobby’s Deli. The local landmark appears in the scenes along with the Adams Theatre, which closed in 1989 but was brought back to life for the movie.

Chase is particularly proud of the re-staging of the theater, and in another scene, the inclusion of Bahrs Landing, a 104-year-old Jersey Shore fixture still in operation in Highlands. Holsten’s in Bloomfield, which has become a tourist destination for “Tony’s booth,” again serves an important role in this story. Satriale’s, originally staged in Kearny, was recreated in Paterson.

“I wanted more of the film to be shot in New Jersey than it was,” Chase says — other filming took place in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Yonkers. “New Jersey had just come up with their new filmmaker-friendly tax situation. But Warner Bros. found it not friendly enough, I guess.”

The Newark riots arrive early in the film and take up a brief part of the story, but the event situates Tony and Dickie’s stories in the real history of the city. This eruption of violence comes as the Soprano crew is facing a challenge from Black gangsters in Newark’s Central Ward.

Tony winner and Oscar nominee Leslie Odom Jr. (”Hamilton,” “One Night in Miami”) plays Harold McBrayer, who starts out as a loyal enforcer in the numbers racket under Dickie Moltisanti, a childhood friend. But as change comes to his city, Harold wants to be more than Dickie’s employee.

“The tension in our ‘Many Saints of Newark,’ the tension between the Black community and the Italian community, is almost like the heat in Spike (Lee’s) ‘Do the Right Thing’ or how the heat plays in a Tennessee Williams play,” Odom, 40, tells NJ Advance Media. “Our whole story, it kind of springs up out of the fires in the streets. The fire in the street mirrors the fires inside Dickie and Harold and Hollywood and Tony.”

In the movie, young Tony Soprano sees the glow of the fires from his bedroom.

Chase, who wrote the “Many Saints of Newark” script with “Sopranos” screenwriter Lawrence Konner, grew up in Clifton and North Caldwell. He was living in Caldwell during the 1967 riots. Chase, then 22, regularly drove his high school sweetheart Denise Kelly — his fiancee then, now his wife — to her job with Prudential in downtown Newark.

“We did a lot of research, but not half as much as Alan Taylor did,” Chase says of the riots. “He really drilled deep.”

Taylor, known for directing “Game of Thrones” and the films “Thor: The Dark World” and “Terminator Genisys,” won an Emmy for helming a 2007 episode of “The Sopranos” titled “Kennedy and Heidi.”

In the “Sopranos” prequel, the director depicts the real arrest of Black cab driver John Smith, who was beaten by police, setting off four days of rioting in which 26 people died.

Warner Bros. hired Black consultants to work with Taylor and the producers, including Chase. Writer, filmmaker and activist Jamal Joseph (”Panther Baby”), a former Black Panther who served nine years in state and federal prison, helped with the dialogue during the writing process, Chase says.

Odom, who binged “The Sopranos” during the pandemic, used his own family as inspiration for Harold McBrayer. Even though his grandfather’s factory job differed from Harold’s path in the criminal underworld, their families both moved north during the Great Migration.

In the film, Harold has to deal with everyday racism from the Soprano crew, showing “how much you had to stomach as a Black person if you wanted to feed your family,” Odom says, pointing to the example of Sammy Davis Jr., who had to stand onstage as his famous friends in the Rat Pack made racist jokes.

“So it did ring true to me,” he says. “And I also know from some experience the way that those microaggressions add up inside you.”

One of the many revelations of “The Many Saints of Newark” is Italian actor Michela De Rossi (”Boys Cry,” “The Rats”), who makes her American screen debut in the film.

De Rossi, 28, plays Giuseppina Moltisanti, née Bruno, an immigrant from outside Naples who arrives in Newark with a shiny new American Dream after she marries Liotta’s “Hollywood” Dick.

Chase had his heart set on another Italian actor for the role when he saw De Rossi’s video audition.

“They flew her over here, and she did a reading with Alessandro,” he says. “And she was great. And it was as much about meeting her in person as it was about the reading. Just her personality just conveyed so much, very expressive. I don’t mean in the Italian way, waving hands around and stuff — just very expressive and extremely intelligent in a language which isn’t hers.”

Nivola, who speaks Italian, was a handy resource for De Rossi, who hails from Rome and learned to converse in Neapolitan for the film.

“When I had trouble, when I didn’t understand something, he was next to me, translating for me,” she says. “So we had a great exchange. I was fascinated by the way he never left the character.”

De Rossi was one of many cast members to embark on a “Sopranos” binge.

“I saw the whole thing in a month when I got the role,” she says. (Her series-appropriate diagnosis for her stepson Dickie: “He needs to go to a therapist.”)

At first, De Rossi was intimidated by the prospect of working with Ray Liotta, since she grew up watching his movies.

“I found someone who listened, who trusted me, who helped me,” she says. “It’s been amazing to work with him.”

“She was in it to win it,” Liotta says. “She went for it.”

The actor, born in Newark, was adopted when he was 6 months old by parents who were active in Union Township politics. Years ago, Chase had tried to recruit Liotta for “The Sopranos” as Ralph Cifaretto (Cliffside Park’s Joe Pantoliano). Liotta was working on the film “Hannibal,” and it just wasn’t the right time, he says. Then “Many Saints” came around.

“I wasn’t on anybody’s list to be in it,” Liotta says. “I said, ‘You know what? I want to meet David Chase. Maybe there’s a chance.’”

From there, Liotta flew to New York to see Chase and Taylor. He says he was told going in that there would be no guarantees.

“By the end of the lunch, they offered me the part.”

The “Sopranos” film is being promoted as “The Many Saints of Newark: A Sopranos Story.”

As for that “A,” Chase would like a word.

“The ‘A Sopranos Story’ is corporate wishful thinking,” he says. “I don’t know about future ones. I just don’t know.”

COVID-19 pushed Warner Bros. to move its entire slate of films to HBO Max for 31 days after their theatrical release.

Like other filmmakers, Chase has not been shy in insisting that his movie was meant to be seen in a theater. Before late 2020, “The Many Saints of Newark” was intended for a big screen-only debut.

Then again, so was Chase’s original pitch for “The Sopranos” (a mobster in therapy, having issues with his mother). The longtime TV writer and producer, who won five Emmys for the show after working on series like “Northern Exposure” and “The Rockford Files,” always wanted to make movies.

His directorial feature film debut arrived with “Not Fade Away” (2012), starring James Gandolfini and John Magaro, who as Silvio Dante, intensely channels a grimacing Steven Van Zandt in the “Sopranos” prequel.

Certain scenes in the film — everything that unfolds in downtown Newark, Giuseppina’s arrival by ship — are clearly meant to play in a theater. But diehard fans who savor every callback to the series (there are many!), may want to revisit the story on HBO Max anyway.

For Michael Gandolfini, enthusiasm for the prequel, wherever people watch it, has been heartening.

“There’s times that I’ve seen prequels or reboots and it hasn’t been met with such faith and love that we have been receiving, especially from Jersey,” he says. “It means the world to all of us. We all wanted to do justice to David and justice to the fans.”

Would he return as Tony Soprano, if asked?

“If there’s more to say about Tony and a different thing to explore and David is willing to, I’m there,” Gandolfini says.

What about a prequel series?

Chase has three words, and they are not “don’t stop believing.”

“No. No. No.”

He pauses.

“I mean, they own it, they can do whatever they want with it,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to be involved with something like that.”

But more movies?

“No, I’m not ruling that out,” Chase says. “You know what? If we did another movie, it would have to take place in New Jersey.”

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.