“It almost happened once”: the role Christopher Walken nearly played on ‘The Sopranos’
When Christopher Walken started his career in the 1960s, television was seen as a means to an end. There was a clear difference between being a movie star and a TV actor, and no performer with designs on reaching the mountaintop would be caught dead in a recurring episodic role.
The small screen was where youngsters cut their teeth to gain credits and rack up reps, while for the veterans, it was a nice and relaxing way to wind down once their big screen tenure had run its course. Of course, it’s an entirely different world now, and Walken could have been on the ground floor.
As tended to be the case with most cinematic superstars of his generation, Walken’s rise up the ranks coincided with his absence from TV. After a 1977 guest spot in Kojak, the only series he appeared for the next 35 years was Saturday Night Live, which he hosted eight times between 1990 and 2023.
He did make a number of made-for-TV movies, though, but it wasn’t until The Outlaws premiered in October 2021 that he took his first-ever multi-season part, serving as a regular in the first two runs before scaling back his contributions for the third. He quickly followed it with another major part in the acclaimed Severance, which earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination.
The current ‘Golden Age’ of TV can be traced back to The Sopranos, the slow-burning crime classic that boasted plenty of recognisable guest stars. Walken could have been one of them, only to miss out on an arc that spanned eight episodes and became a regular scene-stealing highlight.
“You know, it almost happened once,” the Academy Award winner admitted to Carlo Cavagna when asked why he hadn’t popped up in The Sopranos. “In fact, it was the part that Peter Bogdanovich played. They had several people they were thinking about.”
Actor and filmmaker Bogdanovich appeared intermittently between the second and fourth seasons as Elliot Kupferberg, the therapist of Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi, who was herself the psychiatrist of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, and he repeatedly tries to convince his charge to pass Tony off to another one of her colleagues.
It’s a small but memorable character, with Kupferberg becoming increasingly interested in the gossip and salacious details surrounding Tony’s extracurricular activities, which ultimately leads to a major breach in doctor-patient confidentiality when he can no longer keep that juicy information to himself.
If the stars had aligned, Walken could have played the role instead, and his mere presence would have made for a completely different twist on the character. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, and the idiosyncratic icon never got the chance to take his unique talents to one of the greatest TV shows ever made.
