What really happened when the scene cut to black?
If you thought fans stopped talking about The Sopranos finale since it ended in 2007, fuggeddaboutit!
The final scene of the series left fans curious about the fate of Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini) — and amid the many theories discussed since it aired (even from members of the cast) — it wouldn’t be for another 14 years that director David Chase would finally clarify what happened.
First, let us set the scene. An anxious Tony is pictured alone in a booth at Holsten’s, awaiting his family. We hear the sound of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” in the background, but Tony hears the bell dinging every time the door opens. Viewers felt the suspense. The bell rings one last time as Steve Perry sings, “Don’t stop!…” — and the screen abruptly cuts to black.
Fans panicked: Did their cable cut out? Was this the end for Tony? Would they ever have closure? Fortunately, Chase addressed the cliffhanger in a November 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, wherein he explained what really went down on that New Jersey night — at least he appeared to before walking that explanation back via film critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s Twitter.
David Chase
Premiering in 1999, The Sopranos follows the turbulent life of Tony Soprano, an Italian-American mobster, and the difficulties he faces in balancing his immediate family while heading his organized crime “family” — the mob, that is. Between frequent anxiety attacks and threatening rival gangs, there’s a lot Tony must deal with to survive. During its six-season run, the show transforms into an increasingly violent, complex, morally ambiguous narrative about evolving times and past grudges.
Although it ended on that iconic, much-discussed note, it wasn’t initially what Chase had envisioned for the show’s finale. However, he did always imagine Tony would die.
“The scene I had in my mind was not that scene. Nor did I think of cutting to black,” Chase told THR. “I had a scene in which Tony comes back from a meeting in New York in his car. At the beginning of every show, he came from New York into New Jersey, and the last scene could be him coming from New Jersey back into New York for a meeting at which he was going to be killed.”
The reactions to the more cryptic scene he eventually filmed came as a surprise to the director, who didn’t expect it to get the attention it received.
“I had no idea it would cause that much … of an uproar,” Chase said. “Nobody said anything about the episode. No, it was all about the ending.”
For years, the show’s sudden and unexpected ending left fans unsatisfied because the fate of Tony remained unanswered. According to Tony himself, “There’s only two endings for a guy like me, a high profile guy — dead or in the can.” General opinions toward the Italian antihero varied throughout the 86 episodes, but many wanted to see his demise — something Chase wasn’t too thrilled about.
“What was annoying was how many people wanted to see Tony killed,” he said. “That bothered me. … They wanted to see him go face-down in linguini, you know? And I just thought, ‘God, you watched this guy for seven years, and I know he’s a criminal. But don’t tell me you don’t love him in some way, don’t tell me you’re not on his side in some way.’ ”
The Sopranos made major stars out of Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, Lorraine Bracco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Robert Michael Iler, Dominic Chianese Corrado (“Junior” Soprano) and Steven Van Zandt, many of whom have weighed in on that shocking final moment.
Following Chase’s comments about the finale in 2021, see what the rest of the Sopranos cast has said about the iconic final episode that famously cut to black.
Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano
Playing the role of matriarch and Tony’s wife, Falco questioned the final scene at first but trusted Chase’s thought process.
“First, I thought my script was missing some pages, which I’m sure many people thought,” she said during a 2017 interview with Television Academy Foundation. “Then I knew in a larger part of myself that it had meaning and significance that eluded me. I never doubted that it did have significance and meant something or was meaningful in some way because I trusted David. I know he put a lot of thought into how to end it.”
Falco said she was proud of the ending Chase wrote, especially since he “was brave enough to do it in the way that he knew wasn’t going to please everybody.”
She added: “Some people wanted to see him riddled with bullets, some people wanted to see him kill all [his enemies] … And he did none of that.”
Falco also mentioned that people always ask her what actually happens to Tony after the scene cuts to black, as if she has inside information that wasn’t revealed to the public. She said she tells them, “We cut the cameras, and we went home … That was it. There is no ending that we know about that you don’t.”
Michael Imperioli as Christopher Moltisanti
Portraying Tony’s protégé and member of the DiMeo crime family — Imperioli recalled watching the finale live alongside his castmates when it premiered in 2007. It was an emotional moment for the actors for more than one reason.
“We were all just, like, speechless,” he said during a conversation with the Director’s Guild of America in 2015. “First of all, you hear the music, and you know that not only is this the end of the show, but it’s the end of all of us being together for all these years. So that’s hitting you emotionally and personally.”
Just like fans, Imperioli added that his fellow cast members were also unsettled by Chase’s sudden ending.
“Some of the guys were not so happy with it,” he said. “They were a little bit surprised. They were expecting a more [definitive ending]. I always thought it was brilliant.”
Broaching the subject again, Imperioli expounded on his feelings about the controversial conclusion during an episode of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? in 2022.
“I’ve gone back and forth,” he said. “And then I thought maybe it’s just what you see is what you get. That’s the end of the story. There’s no dying, there’s no what if, there’s no what happened to Tony; it just ends right there. I don’t know.”
Lorraine Bracco as Jennifer Melfi
While many believe Tony’s fate ended in tragedy, Bracco thought otherwise. Playing the role of Tony’s psychiatrist, Bracco was just as shocked about the ending — but has remained hopeful about her character’s client.
“I always believed [Tony Soprano] lived,” she told Bruce Bozzi of Radio Andy in August 2020.
In a November 2021 appearance on the Talking Sopranos podcast, Bracco admitted she was angry about the ending.
“I remember being upset [with] the direction that David [Chase] was bringing Melfi,” she said. “I just felt like he wanted me to get rid of [Tony]. I felt that he did it in a very abrupt way. I don’t think that she should have done it that way. I would have liked for it to have been more meaningful.”
Concerning her character, Bracco believed Jennifer “cared for Tony.”
“Even though he was a f—– up, and he was never going to really straighten out,” she added. “But I think she really cared for him. You don’t spend seven years with someone and [then] discard them. I felt bad about that.”
Jamie-Lynn Sigler as Meadow Soprano
Sigler played Tony’s daughter, who dashes toward the door in the final scene. She was surprised by the ending because “it wasn’t written the way it happened” on-screen, she told Us Weekly in June 2017. Sigler shared that the cast also thought their cable cut out in the middle of the scene.
“I knew that we didn’t film anything past me coming through the door, so we thought it was just going to be a slow fade,” she said. “So when we watched it as a cast for the first time, and it cut to black, we thought something happened to the projector. We didn’t know that was how it was going to be.”
She also told Radio Times in 2017 that she remembered thinking, “People are either going to love it or be really pissed off.”
During a December 2019 appearance on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, a fan asked Sigler if she would have changed anything about the finale. Her answer? “Not at all.”
“I think it ended perfectly,” she said, adding, “I think that whether he died or not, people would’ve been upset or not satisfied. So I think it left it for everyone to have their own perfect ending for Tony Soprano.”
Robert Michael Iler as A.J. Soprano
Iler, who played Tony’s son A.J., revealed that he didn’t watch the final episode when it aired, but he heard many confused reactions from viewers.
“I remember being at a friend’s house in the Hamptons, and everybody was watching it inside,” Iler told Radio Times in 2017. “I was outside with one of my friends, and I wasn’t watching it. I remember hearing them saying, ‘What just happened?’ ”
The actor thought the scene was brilliant in keeping fans talking since it aired in 2007.
“If the last scene was just Tony getting shot in the head, that would have been it,” he said. “People would have talked about it for a month or two, and then it would have been over. But to have an open ended discussion still 10 years later, obviously what he did was genius.”
Steven Van Zandt as Silvio Dante
Playing the role of Silvio, the consigliere and right-hand man to Tony, Van Zandt wrote in an excerpt from his memoir, Unrequited Infatuations, featured in Vanity Fair in September 2021 that he’d been asked “a thousand times” what happened to Tony. The day after the finale aired, he appeared on a radio show and was bombarded for a “straight hour” with “complaints, consternation and downright insults about the surprise ending.”
After an hour of the nonstop critiques, he recalled saying, ” ‘OK, smart-a—-. You don’t like that ending, let’s hear yours!’ ”
The answer? “Silence,” he said, especially when asked if they would’ve liked to see Tony, Carmela or the kids die — leading him to conclude, “So maybe it wasn’t such a bad ending after all.”
