Chase Talks The Death Of Tony Soprano

Discussing The Sopranos ending in a new book titled The Sopranos Sessions by entertainment journalists Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, creator David Chase was asked:

‘When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s, you just meant, “I think I have two more years” worth of stories left in me.’

Chase responded, ‘Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end. I remember talking with [writer/ executive producer] Mitch Burgess about it. But it wasn’t – it was slightly different.’

Chase said that the original ‘death scene’ involved Tony’s feud with New York mobster Johnny Sack, a prevalent theme in the show’s fifth season that aired in 2004.

‘Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting,’ Chase said. ‘But we didn’t do that.’

Seitz told Chase, ‘You realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.’

After what the journalists described as a ‘long pause,’ Chase responded, ‘F*** you guys.’