Edie Falco recalled being “intimidated” by a young Jamie-Lynn Sigler on The Sopranos set.
“I saw you as a highly functional type-A young woman. … There was a distance between you and I when we worked,” Falco, 60, recalled during an appearance on Sigler, 42, and Christina Applegate’s “MeSsy” podcast on Wednesday, March 27. “It was not on purpose.”
Falco went on to explain that because Sigler’s “real mom” was present on the HBO show’s set, she never wanted to act like “more than an actress playing your mother.”
“But also, you portrayed yourself — yourself, not the character — as so competent,” she continued. “The truth is, when I was a kid in high school, I was a weirdo. I came from a crazy family, and I felt like everybody could tell I was a weirdo, and I would meet girls like you and I was terrified of them.”
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She added: “They just looked like they knew what was going on. They knew how to be with people. They knew how to function at a high level and always do a good job.”
Sigler, who was listening to Falco, laughed upon hearing this.
“To be honest with you, since we are all women and at certain point, we all become the same age, I was intimidated by you,” Falco concluded. “It’s the truth.”
Sigler appeared baffled by her former costar’s admission.
“That is wild to me because I was just such a little mess inside,” Sigler replied. “I felt so undeserving of every moment that I was there. I was waiting to be found out that, like, I shouldn’t have been there or didn’t belong.”
Falco and Sigler starred as mother-daughter duo Carmela Soprano and Meadow Soprano, respectively, on The Sopranos, which aired on HBO from 1999 to 2007. The show has continued to find new fans and new generations becoming obsessed with the series — giving birth to the “mob wife” era.
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As the podcast continued, both women detailed the struggles they experienced while shooting The Sopranos. Falco, for one, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003 and went through chemotherapy while filming the show. She went into remission a year later.
Sigler recalled getting diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2002 during the show’s run and going through a divorce — things that Falco helped her overcome. (Sigler was married to A.J. DiScala from 2003 to 2006. She went on to marry Cutter Dykstra in 2016, and together they share two kids.)
“I don’t know what season it was, but I’ll never forget. I came home, I was going through my divorce, and I came home to my apartment in New York, and I had a message on my answering machine, and it was you Edie,” Sigler recalled. “You were telling me how well I did in the episode that had just aired that night and how proud you were of me.”
She continued through tears, “I cannot tell you, that single moment … it made me keep going. It was a time where they were calling in acting coaches to the set for me because I couldn’t tell anybody what was wrong, but people could tell that something was wrong.”
