The Sopranos’ series finale has kept fans speculating for 13 years, thanks to the ambiguity over what happened to Tony Soprano.
Hailed as one of the greatest TV endings of all time, The Sopranos ended with Tony (James Gandolfini) eating with his family at Holsten’s diner in the wake of a turf war between the New Jersey and New York Mafia families.
As Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing plays on the jukebox, his daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) arrives at the restaurant and the screen goes to Tony – but as the diner door opens with a bell ringing, the screen cuts to black and the credits roll in silence.
The controversial ending has led to over a decade of theories and speculation as to whether Tony was killed by a hitman – but now we finally know what happened to the mob boss.
In a resurfaced interview for the 2019 book The Sopranos Session, series creator David Chase seemed to confirm that Tony was indeed whacked in the dinner.
According to USA Today, Chase was speaking to co-author Alan Sepinwall, who said: ‘When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s, you just meant, “I think I have two more years’ worth of stories left in me”.’
Chase said: ‘Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end…
‘Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting. But we didn’t do that.’
Co-author Matt Zoller Seitz said: ‘You realise, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene’, with Chase saying: ‘F*** you guys’ after a long pause.
He later said that he decided not to do a ‘straight death scene’.
Later in the interview, Chase was asked whether fans who think Tony died are incorrect.
He said: ‘I don’t know if that’s my job. They’ve interpreted the scene that way. That should be a good thing, that there’s different interpretations.
‘It was not my intention to create a 10-year long puzzlement about this. No matter what I say about it, I always dig myself in deeper.’
And in the published book, Chase explained the ambiguity of the final moments of the drama, saying: ‘[The point was] that he could have been whacked in the diner. We all could be whacked in a diner. That was the point of the scene.’
So in another life, Tony could still be getting onion rings in that diner.
The Sopranos starring Gandolfini, Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco and Michael Imperiolo, has been named the best TV series of all time by multiple publications and won five Golden Globes and 21 Primetime Emmys.
And next year, the mob drama is getting a prequel film in the form of The Many Saints Of Newark, starring Alessandro Nivola, Leslie Odom Jr, Jon Bernthal and Ray Liotta.
