“So yes, not everyone made it out alive”: The Sopranos Character Even the Cast Begged David Chase to Not K*ll Off in Season 2, He Didn’t Listen
The Sopranos was never safe from controversy and David Chase made sure of it when he offed one beloved character as early as Season 2.
Long before Game of Thrones traumatized the world with the brutal, divisive, and merciless slashing of on-screen favorites every other episode, HBO began the trend with The Sopranos. The darkly humorous series took a gritty storyline about mob life in New Jersey and turned it into a rendition of whack-a-mole with its characters.
With time, creator David Chase became infamous for the ruthless cruelty with which he disposed of his own beloved creations. Meanwhile, the show became the epicenter of much controversy and debate with its non-committal deaths, pitiless betrayals, and one very scandalous ending.
But it was one episode in Season 2 of The Sopranos that started it all.
The Sopranos Blows Up With a Season 2 Death
The Sopranos allowed David Chase, creator of the HBO crime drama, to play God over his own domain. Judging without bias or prejudice and scheduling the executions of fan-favorite characters weeks beforehand, Chase liked the idea of his audience fearing his creation, always frazzled by the uncertainty of who would go next.
However, before The Sopranos shook the fans out of their television entertainment slumber, one Season 2 episode of the HBO series set the trend that would later become contagious in Game of Thrones.
After news got out of the impending death of one primary cast member while filming Season 2, the cast of The Sopranos took immediate action by pleading their case to David Chase – to no avail. The character was revealed to be the Soprano gangster and a close friend of Tony Soprano, Salvatore Bonpensiero.
Played by Vincent Pastore, the character also known as Big Pussy became the first victim of Chase’s merciless pen and announced the arrival of a darker age of television where projects were judged by the measure of tragic realism.
The Sopranos Cast on the Death That Changed It All
In a 2024 retrospective interview with the cast of The Sopranos for Empire magazine, actress Lorraine Bracco who played Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist on the show, recalled how Salvatore’s death rocked the whole cast. Despite the characters surviving under the purview of creator David Chase, Bracco recalled how the cast and crew begged him to retain Salvatore in the show.
In turn, David Chase struck a compromise with his cast. He claimed (via Screen Rant):
The compromise was, we killed him but promised to bring him back for a few episodes (in flashbacks and dream sequences). That death had a big imprint on the show. It said to the audience: no-one’s safe.
Bonpensiero did return multiple times throughout the remainder of The Sopranos as Chase had promised, including one final stint in The Many Saints of Newark, the prequel to The Sopranos (although the character was played by another actor).
However, as Chase predicted, Sal’s death forever altered the landscape of television drama by turning the death of fan-favorite characters into a trend. In recent days, the trend was carried forth by shows like Game of Thrones and Supernatural, where fans would always be caught up in the shocking and ever-unpredictable deaths of characters that fans grew to fall in love with.
