Sopranos Alum Joe Pantoliano Says Drift Director Bobby Moresco Once Saved His Life in a Fist Fight

Joe Pantoliano has made a career out of playing the crooked, the criminal and the corrupt. He played a pimp in Risky Business (1983), a murderous criminal in Goonies (1985), a selfish traitor in The Matrix (1999), a vengeful husband in Memento (2000) and, most memorably, a mobster so sadistic in The Sopranos that even Tony Soprano couldn’t bear him. That last role won him an Emmy. Pantoliano knew his character type at an early age, he said in a #LiveAtFive interview with Broadway.com's Paul Wontorek. “I wanted to get out of [Hoboken], and it was either sports (that wasn’t going to happen), scholastics (I couldn’t even read yet) or get a gun and rob banks,” he laughed. “So, I wound up playing guys that rob banks on television.”

The frequent screen actor made his Broadway debut in 2002 as a replacement for Johnny, the lovestruck short order cook, in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. These days, he’s lending his tough-guy talents to Drift, a new off-Broadway play by William Francis Hoffman, running at New World Stages. It's about murder, lies and reconciliation in a 1950s working class family. “When we meet our central character Angelo, he’s just come home from a 10-year stretch in prison for murdering a man, and we discover as the play begins that his father committed suicide," explained Pantoliano, who plays the father’s business partner. “We discover that there’s a lot of secrets, a lot of trauma and that you can’t escape fate, even when it’s bad." 

Pantoliano—who last appeared on the New York stage in White Rabbit Red Rabbit (2016) off-Broadway—said he joined the production because of Drift director Bobby Moresco, who's the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Crash. Moresco and Pantoliano have been friends for 45 years and the origin of their friendship sounds ripped from the pages of The Sopranos. 

“He saved my life!” Pantoliano said. The two met in the 1970s when they were young actors working on an NYU feature film. “We were both 21 years old, got our SAG cards, and doing an improv scene with a director in his apartment on Lafayette Street,” said Pantoliano. “I was working with this young actor, and the director gave me a note to really get under the guy's skin and get him mad at me. Well, he got so mad at me that he tried to throw me out of the director's fifth floor bedroom window, and the director thought that we were acting.” Then, Moresco walked on to the set and saw the brawl. “I was holding onto the guy so hard, we would've both gone out, and Bobby grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and pulled the both of us back into the bedroom to safety. The director was like, ‘Why'd you stop?’”

It was good training, it seems, because Pantoliano went on to forge an almost 40-year career that’s gone from one fight scene to the next. To hear him tell it, “I’ve been in over 200 movies and only seven have been good,” he laughed. “I had an agent once say to me, one of my first agents said, ‘Look, the trick really is to make a living in show business and anything after that is gravy.’’

As for Drift, which opens on March 16, Pantoliano extended an offer no audience member could refuse. “If you come tonight—and you come a half hour before curtain—you mention my name, Joey Pants, and tickets are only 30 bucks,” he joked. “Say Joey Pants sent me.”

See the rest of Pantoliano's #LiveAtFive interview below.