Chris Diamantopoulos Reveals Late Sopranos Star Tony Sirico Accidentally Hit Him with a Real Pipe (Exclusive)

“I got whacked by Paulie Walnuts and lived to tell about it,” ‘The Sticky’ star jokes of his guest-star appearance on ‘The Sopranos’

The Sticky star Chris Diamantopoulos received real The Sopranos treatment when he guest-starred on the show.

Diamantopoulos chatted with PEOPLE about his new Prime Video series and his career in Hollywood, with more than 120 credits including a guest appearance on the HBO hit series The Sopranos.

The now 49-year-old actor appeared in the final season’s fourth episode, “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh.” He portrayed Jason Barone, an New Jersey native mourning the loss of his father, who was secretly working with Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri (Tony Sirico). Unaware of his father’s mafia ties, he disobeys family friend Tony’s request and is quickly met with the consequences: a beating from Paulie.

Diamantopoulos shared his memories of working with the late actors and the impressions they left on him. Gandolfini died in June 2013 at age 51. Sirico died in July 2022; he was 79.

Although “it was a rite of passage to be whacked by Paulie Walnuts,” Diamantopoulos says, the scene didn’t go as planned.

“Sirico had two pipes, a lead pipe and a rubber pipe, one to use when the camera was on me, and one to use when the camera was on him,” he says. “Which one do you think he used on me the first time?”

“The answer is it wasn’t the fake one,” he says, joking that he “got whacked by Paulie Walnuts and lived to tell about it.”

Diamantopoulos, also known for his work in The Office and Silicon Valley, was thrilled to film alongside Gandolfini.

“I remember doing a scene with him where he was in the hospital. His character had to have stabbing pains in his abdomen,” Diamantopoulos says.

“I remember him outside on a break, looking for a particular stone. He wanted to find a jagged rock, and he hid it under his hospital gown and had his arm over it so that when it called for the character to be in pain.” Diamantopoulos notes that Gandolfini “pushed his arm down and the rock dug into his gut, and it gave him a chance to react to it.”

“I thought that was really a practical effect,” he says. “A really neat thing to see.”

Diamantopoulos says he’s “learned a lot from so many of the actors he’s worked with.” But his latest character, The Sticky’s Mike Byrne, is a mob type that audiences haven’t seen on TV as much. “The character, who he is on the surface and who he presents when we first see him, is most definitely not who he really is,” he says.

Diamantopoulos stars as mob “errand boy” Mike, who teams up with Margo Martindale’s maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry and Guillaume Cyr as security guard Remy Bouchard to pull a multi-million dollar heist on Quebec’s maple syrup surplus.

“I enjoyed finding the cracks in the character, then shattering them and exposing underneath what was really there — this frightened, insecure, broken loser of a man,” he says.