Jamie Lynn Sigler can vividly recall her final conversation with her Sopranos costar and TV dad, James Gandolfini.
“We were at a casino,” Sigler, 44, exclusively told Us Weekly for her recent cover story promoting her upcoming book, And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope. “He looked at me, and he was like, ‘Do you need help walking?’ And I was like, ‘I’m OK right now.’ He was like, ‘All right, you tell me if you do.’ And I was like, ‘I will.'”
Gandolfini — who played Mafia boss Tony Soprano, father to Sigler’s character, Meadow — was the only person on the cast of the hit HBO show who knew that the actress had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).
“I remember him being proud, like, ‘OK, look at you. You’re still doing this. You’ve got this,'” she recalled of the pair’s final run-in. “It was a beautiful moment that I am very grateful we had because his death was obviously shocking to all of us.”
Gandolfini died of a heart attack while vacationing in Italy with his family in 2013. He was only 51.
“I just remember how happy he was,” Sigler told Us of her late castmate. “I was so happy to see him in a beautiful marriage [to Deborah Lin], in a beautiful space in his life, creatively doing things that he really loved.”
The “gentle” and “caring” Gandolfini Sigler knew off-screen was in stark contrast to the tough guy he played on the set of their crime drama, which aired from 1999 to 2007.
“Playing Tony Soprano was really hard on him,” she noted of the actor. “It was torture in many ways. He gave every ounce of himself, obviously, and so to see him so settled and so happy just made me so happy. He was always the dad. He was our pillar. He was our rock. But we also saw him struggle, and we also saw him go through really difficult times. And so it was almost like the similar moment of him and I both being like, ‘We’re good right now. Look at us. We’re doing good.'”
Sigler was diagnosed with MS at the age of 20, about halfway through The Sopranos‘ six-season run. At first, she chose to keep her health battle a secret.
“I felt like I was always acting. I felt like I was always pretending. I felt like I was always living a lie,” she admitted to Us. “I had no idea what authenticity felt like. I had no idea what truth felt like. … I didn’t even know who I was. All these secrets had piled up on top that I was just suffocated and literally just trying to survive every day. I was constantly in fight or flight.”
Sigler recalled Gandolfini sensing something was going on with his costar.
“He had this way about him where it’s almost like he would look at me just long enough to be like, ‘I know you. I know something’s going on,'” she shared. “And he would never press me. He would look at me, ‘How are you?’ And I would say, ‘I’m good.’ And he’d just look at me and nod.”
Ultimately, Sigler decided to confide in her TV dad, and the actor dutifully kept her secret until the very end. (Sigler went public with her health struggles in 2016, nearly three years after Gandolfini’s death.)
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“He knew that I couldn’t carry whatever I was carrying alone anymore, and he never really asked me about it again,” she said. “Sometimes if we were off set, he would ask me about it. If we were ever at a cast party or a charity event or some appearance, he would always pull me aside and be like, ‘How’s the MS? Tell me what’s going on.’ But never at work, never in front of anybody.”
Sigler added, “I don’t know if he knew this, but just having somebody [on set] know was a game changer. It truly shifted a lot of the energy for me there, just knowing that just somebody knows my secret and I’m not carrying this alone.”
And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope hits bookstores on Tuesday, May 5.
