Update: Seitz has shot down the report, tweeting that Chase was speaking of another ending he’d considered years before and “even that scene was open to interpretation”.
Original: A slip of the tongue has finally confirmed a lingering question about one of the most famous TV endings of all time – “The Sopranos”.
The Emmy-winning HBO mob drama closed out in 2007 with the New Jersey and New York Mafia families in a turf war and with Tony Soprano (the late James Gandolfini) in busy Holsten’s diner about to have a meal with his family who arrive one-by-one as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” plays across the scene.
Then, as his daughter opens the door to enter the diner and Tony looks up at her – the screen suddenly cuts to black silence for many seconds before the end credits appear. For over a decade that scene has been picked apart, and there’s long been speculation that one of the other people in the diner killed Tony in that moment.
Now The Independent reports that”The Sopranos” creator David Chase let the answer slip during an interview for his book “The Sopranos Sessions”. Chase has been asked about that ending numerous times in the past and has always chosen his words carefully and played it very ambivalent – leaving the moment up to interpretation.
In a new roundtable discussion though, co-author Alan Sepinwall asked Chase: “When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s [the diner], 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 … But we didn’t do that.” Co-author Matt Zoller Seitz caught that distinction and said: “You realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.” Chase, realising his mistake, quickly replied: “F - - k you guys.”
The reveal comes as Chase has been working on a film prequel to the series titled “The Many Saints of Newark” which is slated to be released on March 12th 2021.
