Given that it premiered four months before I was born, I was definitely late to The Sopranos, but it quickly became a major influence when I finally got the chance to watch it in college. Although every character was great, Adriana Le Cirva (Drea de Matteo) was my favorite, being the closest thing to a wholesome person this world had. This made her death all the more devastating, and it was just as difficult for the crew to say goodbye to one of their greatest leads, who gave everything she had during her final scene. Even by the standards of a show known to push boundaries, her death stands out as an emotional and tragic demise for a truly lovable character, one whose horrific fate hammers home just how terrifying a life of crime can be for everyone even remotely involved.
Few Characters Were More Innocent on ‘The Sopranos’ Than Adriana
In any kind of story with morally gray characters, you need a genuinely good and idealistic person to balance things, and no one did this in The Sopranos better than Adriana. While not blind to the criminal lifestyle of her partner, she was hardly involved in the mob life, and there was an innocence to her that not even the literal children like Meadow (Jaime Lynn-Sigler) or AJ (Robert Iller) possessed. Yet, she could also be incredibly naive, and in a violent show like this one, the more intimate abuse Adriana suffered made me constantly fear for her safety. As the walls started to close in, I knew a confession and confrontation between Adriana and Christopher (Michael Imperioli) was likely inevitable. Still, I was left terrified at how it would unfold.
Their emotional final scene together, for which both actors won an Emmy, was just as heartbreaking as I had initially feared, but the writers also made an important decision afterward, which worked to great dramatic effect. By not showing the conflict Christopher faces, instead saving his discussion with Tony (James Gandolfini) for a future flashback, it makes the phone call and his claimed suicide believable. Of course, this is a mob show where anybody could be killed, but just like Adriana herself, I’d held out hope that she would get away from it and live a happy life. The episode even plays with this idea by showing a brief dream sequence where she escapes before cutting to the shot of her in the car with Silvio (Steven Van Zandt), at which point her destination becomes clear to both herself and the audience.
Killing Adriana Was Hard on Everyone
In the deadly world of The Sopranos, dark moments are to be expected, but that does not mean they will be easy to stomach. Nobody was left quite as heartbroken to lose Adriana than series creator David Chase, who broke his one rule by having the scene pan away just as the fatal shots were fired. Recently, Drea de Maetto revealed in the documentary Wise Guy that another version of the scene where Adriana escapes was filmed to avoid leaks, but she quickly deduced that her time on the show was probably nearing its end. Still, once her last day finally arrived, the actress was ready, and she openly encouraged Steven van Zandt to drop all restraint and deliver the most devastating hit in the series. For many viewers, myself included, not seeing her final moments is a relief, but this emotional farewell by the cast and crew strongly contrasts with their characters. Within a few episodes of her death, Adriana is reduced to a historical footnote, and her own partner, who sacrificed so much for the mob, is later killed anyway for being a liability.
The Execution of Adriana Shows the Darker Side of ‘The Sopranos’
At first glance, one might wonder why the death of Adriana hits so hard in The Sopranos, especially since it was building for an entire season, and she was far from the first character to get whacked. What makes her demise so much more devastating is just how much hope had been invested in such a tragic character. Unlike either Big Pussy (Vincent Pastore) early on or Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi) later in the same season, there is no honorable last drink with friends or a quick mercy killing. Rather, it’s just a woman realizing the true nature of her lover and the mob he serves in all its horrifying clarity, just as it becomes too late to change anything.
While I’ve always loved mob stories, scenes like this serve to remind us just how terrifying a criminal lifestyle feels in reality. By the end of the series, almost every character is either dead, imprisoned, or left under witness protection and forever looking over their shoulder. Gangster films like The Godfather or Goodfellasmight make the mob life seem worth all the trouble it brings, but The Sopranos was made long after the golden age of the mob had ended and had become almost irrelevant. Therefore, such a warning about the show holds up even more today, a full generation after it first aired.
