Vincent Pastore was so good on The Sopranos that he extended his employment past its original expiration date — even if that goodness ultimately meant that his alter ego wound up sleeping with the fishes.
The news that Pastore, best known for playing Sal "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero on the iconic HBO mob drama, was found dead in his Bronx home at the age of 80 reminded me of a story the show's creator, David Chase, told me and Matt Zoller Seitz when we were interviewing him for our book, The Sopranos Sessions.
Late in the first Sopranos season, Paulie Walnuts and Tony began to suspect that Big Pussy had started working as an informant for the feds. Pussy recognized their paranoia and abruptly vanished. Chase had no intention of bringing him back, and only in part because he couldn't imagine the show being successful enough to even get a second season. He loved ambiguity and hated giving viewers what they expected, let alone what they wanted.
Yet Pastore had, in a relatively small amount of screen time, made such an impression on the audience that Chase found himself making a rare exception to that approach. In the aftermath of making the series' debut season, Chase took a trip, again assuming his passion project would quickly vanish into obscurity.
"I came back from vacation," he recalled, "And the show is a phenomenon! So I thought, 'Now what?'" At the same time, everywhere he went, and everything he read about his show's improbable fandom, came with some variation of, "Where is Pussy?" Chase needed a plot, and there was not only demand for this one, but it involved an actor he had really enjoyed working with, on top of the connection Pastore's performance had clearly made with all these new fans.