‘Sopranos’ showrunner finally addresses rumors James Gandolfini kept ‘going missing’ from set

“The Sopranos” showrunner and creator David Chase has confirmed the rumors that James Gandolfini kept “going missing” from set while filming the hit crime drama.

Chase addressed the reports and opened up about his working relationship with the late Tony Soprano actor during an interview with the Guardian published Friday.

“Well, fortunately, I wasn’t the one who dealt with him going missing,” he explained. “That was Ilene Landress, our line manager. She was the one who found out where he was and did everything that needed to be done.”

However, the 80-year-old Emmy winner also acknowledged that Gandolfini wasn’t always happy filming “The Sopranos,” which aired on HBO for six seasons from 1999 to 2007.

“I mean, he asked to meet me a couple of times, once on the banks of the Hudson River when he didn’t want to go to work, and he was so unhappy,” Chase told the outlet.

He added, “This happened three or four times, and we talked and talked and talked, but I was never the one who had to find out where he was.”

Reports that Gandolfini would go missing from the “Sopranos” set first surfaced in James Bailey’s 2025 biography of the late actor, “Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend.”

Phil Abraham, the show’s cinematographer, told Bailey that Gandolfini’s absences became such a problem that the network started fining the actor hundreds of thousands of dollars every time he didn’t show up to work.

“I can’t say I’ve ever been on a show where something like that has gone on, but this was sort of a different beast,” Abraham explained.

“At a certain point, HBO was fining him 250 grand a day,” the cinematographer added. “And he would say, ‘F–k it. I can’t come in to work.’ So we knew then, it’s not just him doing a lot of blow and drinking, and he’s not getting up because he doesn’t want to get up. No, it was deeper than that.”

Like Abraham, Chase acknowledged that Gandolfini’s issues didn’t have anything to do with the show itself.

“He never refused to do anything,” Chase noted. “He never said, ‘I’m gonna go wait in my trailer, and when you’re ready to shoot it the way I want it, come get me.’ That never happened.”

Gandolfini, who went on to win three Emmys for his performance as Tony Soprano, tragically died of a heart attack in June 2013 while on vacation in Rome. He was 51.

He opened up about “The Sopranos” and how he felt “insane” during a candid chat with NJ.com years earlier in 2001, while between Seasons 3 and 4.

“Oh, I’m not sane at all when I’m doing the show,” he said during the interview. “I’m completely insane when I’m doing the show. But my family, my friends – I’ve got some good friends – they all help.”

He added, “I got successful at a late age, so I’m under no delusions about what all this is about. Well, I’m sure I have some delusions. But you know, basically it’s a job. You work hard, and you get tired a little bit, but that’s all it is.”

Mark Kamine, who worked as a location scout on “The Sopranos,” explained how Gandolfini’s personal demons caused chaos during the final seasons of the hit HBO show in his controversial book, “On Locations: Lessons Learned from My Life On Set with The Sopranos and in the Film Industry.”

“I am at the hotel bar when the crew member closest to Jim asks if I want to go down to Atlantic City with Jim and a few others. It’s over an hour away. I decline,” Kamine writes of one Season 5 incident. “The next morning, I’m not surprised when Jim cannot be roused.”

Kamine went on to write that Gandolfini eventually showed up to set “cursing his way through his half-learned lines, doing take after take, drinking coffees and bottles of water, alternatively sheepish and churlish, the way he always is when he f–ks up.”