Piers Morgan Remembers James Gandolfini With Panic Attack Clips And Humblebragging

The sad, too-young passing of actor James Gandolfini has occasioned a deserved outpouring of grief and fond remembrances from the media. Gandolfini died in Italy, yesterday, of an apparent heart attack at the age of 51, a tragedy which CNN’s Piers Morgan handled with all the sensitivity of a diamond contact lens. On Wednesday night’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Morgan interviewed former NBC executive Bob Wright via telephone, as scenes from Gandolfini’s signature HBO series The Sopranos played in the background, including one in which Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano clutches his chest, in the throes of a panic attack, and crashes to the ground.

Anyone who watched The Sopranos knows that Gandolfini’s main character, Tony Soprano, was prone to occasional panic attacks, whose portrayals closely mimicked the appearance of a heart attack. It was a major, if not the major, dramatic fulcrum of the series, the reason the character sought help from Lorraine Bracco‘s psychotherapist character, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Sure enough, mere hours after news of James Gandolfini’s death of an apparent heart attack, CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight played a package of clips from the show, and up popped several scenes of Gandolfini, wrenchingly portraying those scary episodes:

As a heart attack survivor (so far), the moment hit me especially hard, and made me angry. I tweeted about it several times, but it began to occur to me that this might have just been an oversight. An unacceptable, insensitive oversight, but an oversight nonetheless. Here’s hoping none of Gandolfini’s loved-ones were watching.

Then, later in the broadcast, Morgan was chatting with author Patricia Cornwell, and decided to share the heartwarming story of this one time he met James Gandolfini. “I met him just once, I think, may have been twice, but once when I actually talked to him,” Morgan began. “It was outside a hotel here in Beverly Hills, and they couldn’t get his car, they’d lost his car, the valet parking, and he was slowly simmering with rage, I could tell.”

You don’t say, Holmes? A guy getting angry because someone lost his car? Tell me more. “I tried to talk to him, and he was a little bit like ‘Just, not now.'”

Yeah, because what guy who’s just lost his car isn’t overjoyed to be approached by some wanker who wants to chat about “the football?”

“I could see he was beginning boil, like his character,” he continued, making me wonder where this story was going. Is Piers Morgan trying to say that maybe James Gandolfini was annoyed to death?

“He seemed to me…” Piers said, pausing for tact, “He was a very big man. He was sweating profusely that day. He didn’t seem very fit, and it’s probably — I don’t want to speculate about what happened to him…”

What a touching tribute. James Gandolfini, big sweaty guy who once got to meet Piers Morgan. As a guy who will probably die of a heart attack someday, I can at least be thankful that I’m not nearly famous enough to be “immortalized” by Piers Morgan.

James Gandolfini is mainly being remembered for his portrayal of Tony Soprano, but one of his more memorable performances proved the adage that there are no small parts, only small actors. In 1993’s True Romance, Gandolfini played an introspective hitman who brutalizes Patricia Arquette‘s character for several gut-wrenching minutes (even more stomach-churning in the unrated version), while stopping to deliver a monologue about the toll contract murder takes on the soul. Gandolfini carried off the minor miracle of making Quentin Tarantino‘s showy dialogue feel authentic, and the major miracle of humanizing his monstrous character, while denying him even a trace of redemption.

The skill Gandolfini showed in that scene would serve him well in The Sopranos. Many folks credit him for making Tony Soprano likable, but that was the easy part, accomplished in equal part by the writing on the show. Making gangsters likable is what movie and television writers do. The true magic in James Gandolfini’s performance, and the thing that made The Sopranos special, was in the way he unflinchingly portrayed Tony’s viciousness, never winking, never pulling a punch, never creating a moment of doubt that this guy was a monster. In so doing, he created a show in which the most flawed character was the audience, who still rooted for this guy no matter what he did, simply because he was also human. No matter what the writers did, James Gandolfini, the actor, never asked the audience to let Tony off the hook. If you did, that was on you.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.