Lorraine Bracco: ‘I got the Sopranos script... I was very, very upset’

The actor best known for playing Dr Melfi on ‘The Sopranos’ speaks to Louis Chilton about being a woman in a male-dominated Scorsese film, working with a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio, and her role in the new ‘Stranger Things’-esque movie ‘Monster Summer’

I’m always surprised that people still want to talk about it,” says Lorraine Bracco, with an air of smouldering bemusement. “I go out, I go to dinner and it always, always comes back to Goodfellas and The Sopranos.” There’s good reason for that. As Karen Hill, wife of Ray Liotta’s ascendent mobster in Martin Scorsese’s genre-defining 1990 crime classic, Bracco secured her own small but eternal place in film history. And as Dr Jennifer Melfi, the shrewd, erudite psychiatrist to James Gandolfini’s Tony in The Sopranos, she did the same on TV.

It’s ostensibly neither of these projects that I’m speaking to Bracco about today, over the phone as she sits at home in Bridgehampton, New York. But her two landmark roles can’t help but work their way into our conversation. It’s true what they say, the mafia really does have its fingers in everything.

Bracco, now 70, is instead here to talk Monster Summer – a Stranger Things-esque throwback of a movie that follows a group of teens in a small American town investigating a series of paranormal occurrences. The adult cast also includes Mel Gibson and a drawling, cowboy-hatted Kevin James; Bracco plays Miss Halverson, an enigmatic older woman whose arrival to the town coincides suspiciously with the supernatural threat. Her character is, “as Hitchcock would say… the McGuffin”, she laughs.

Bracco’s voice, fibrous and distinctive even in her youth, has taken on a sandpapery decadence in recent years – still, though, her laughter breaks into a high giggle. Comparing Monster Summer to inspirations such as The Goonies and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Bracco explains: “The script felt old school… kids on their bike in the summer, playing baseball, and all of a sudden everything goes crazy and scary. I like that!”

Her co-star Gibson is a notoriously controversial figure, ever since a series of scandals in the 2000s, which included domestic violence allegations and antisemitic remarks. The Lethal Weapon actor was “long gone” by the time Bracco arrived to shoot her scenes in Monster Summer, but she has nothing but good things to say about him. “He’s lovely, smart, beautiful… really, very handsome. And a great director. Braveheart – it’s a magnificent movie.”

For Bracco, Monster Summer mostly involved working with the film’s child stars (including The Black Phone’s Mason Thames, and Broadway’s Julian Lerner). It’s familiar territory. She mentions, for example, the 1992 film Radio Flyer, which saw her star opposite then-child actors Elijah Wood and Joseph Mazzello. “On a human level, I always took the kids out for lunch or dinner, so they would feel that I was more of a friend-mom kind of thing, than an actor,” she recalls. “So, I always broke that mould a bit – and then they react to me as Lorraine.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, meanwhile, was only 19 when Bracco played his mother in 1995’s addiction drama The Basketball Diaries. “He was a baby when I worked with him!” she laughs. “When they first gave me the script, it was like five lines, and I said, ‘Leo, what do you want me to do with this?’ He said, ‘Anything you want. I’m game, let’s do it.’ And we really created that relationship on the set. It’s impressive, trust me. He’s still impressive.” Their mother-son bond was the film’s emotional epicentre – summed up in that famous scene staged across two sides of a closed door, as Bracco is confronted with DiCaprio’s hysterical breakdown.

Witch hunt? Lorraine Bracco in ‘Monster Summer' (Signature Entertainment)

Bracco herself didn’t start acting until relatively late, by industry standards. The daughter of an English mother and Italian father, she grew up in Long Island, before moving to France and working as a model throughout her twenties. She was 25 when she landed her first film role, a part in the French film Duos sur canapé, but it would be another decade – and some rigorous technical training from, among others, legendary acting coach Stella Adler – before she properly had a stab at making it in Hollywood.

By the time of Goodfellas, Bracco was 36, and a mother. It made her perfect for the spiky, compromised Karen Hill. Think of the timeless scene in which Liotta wakes up to find Bracco straddling him, a gun aimed squarely at his face. An ingénue wouldn’t have cut it. “When you become a huge star at the age of 16, 17, 18… it’s very confusing – all that fame and money and trust issues,” Bracco says. “I think there’s a lot that goes on with any of these young actors. I was already a mother of two kids. I was still making oatmeal when [Goodfellas] came out! So I was very grounded.”

Goodfellas – along with the rest of Scorsese’s oeuvre – has been magnetised to critical discourse down the years. Recently, Nicole Kidman had a (rather benign) dig at the director, saying she’d love to work with him – “if he does a film with women”. When I mention this to Bracco, she is diplomatic. “I don’t think she’s wrong,” she says. “There have been strong women roles – one role – in each of his movies. In Raging Bull you had Cathy Moriarty, Sharon Stone in Casino… but the only woman-driven movie I think he really made was with Michelle Pfeiffer [The Age of Innocence]. Other than that, he’s very male-driven. That’s who he is! That is his theme. That and religion.”

But she understands where Kidman is coming from. “Making Goodfellas, I was surrounded by 10 guys,” she says. “We were all surrounded by men – and men that [Scorsese] uses all the time. So, there’s a huge shorthand between a director and an actor.” Was that not intimidating? “Yes – and the only saving grace I had was Ray Liotta,” she says. (Liotta was also a Scorsese first-timer.) “I love Ray. I loved, loved, loved him. He was really my partner in crime on that movie.”

Partners in crime: Liotta and Bracco in ‘Goodfellas’ (Warner Bros)

Bracco is nonetheless fulsome in her tributes to Scorsese, whom she deems “one of the 10 greatest directors of our generation”. She says the same of Ridley Scott, who directed her in 1987’s Someone to Watch Over Me. “That film wasn’t a big success, but I learnt so much from Ridley,” she says, “and he was so beautiful in guiding me and teaching me and believing in me. Beautiful, beautiful. You know, here’s the thing about Ridley: as much as he does all the Gladiator, and Alien, ‘cause he loves all that scary stuff… I think one of the most beautiful parts of Ridley is that he loves women.”

There’s something irrepressibly charming about Bracco’s enthusiasm for cinema. She loves movies, and her answers constantly pull in old classics, famous actors, filmmakers; she seems to have met just about everyone. Curiosity, then, gets the better of me: I ask who else makes her Top 10. The answer is enjoyably eclectic – names from Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood to George Lucas and Pablo Larraín. (Again, she mentions Gibson.) Bracco says she’s never had a mental checklist of directors she wants to work with – unusual, perhaps, for an actor – but seems to have nevertheless worked her way through a decent chunk of her own personal pantheon.

When it comes to television, The Sopranos sits more or less atop every pantheon out there. One of the welcome side-effects of the undying interest in the show is, says Bracco, the chance to learn things she never knew during its production. She mentions the “brilliant” recent documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, produced to mark the series’ 25th anniversary. “I discovered all these things I didn’t know about [creator David Chase] and the actors… because I really only worked with Jim [Gandolfini]. I was not really privy to a lot of what went on on set, except for what went on with Jim and I in Melfi’s office.”

Analyse this: Bracco provided a psychoanalytical foil to Tony Soprano in the hit drama (HBO)

She speaks warmly and bittersweetly of Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack in 2013, and indeed of Dr Melfi – the sort of rich, layered character any actor would dream of. “One of the things that was very important – and unusual – was that she was this very educated Italian woman,” she says. “You never see that! So that was something that propelled me in creating her.”

Bracco has her own issues with the somewhat anticlimactic way Melfi’s storyline ended. “I never did like the way he ended our session together,” she says. “I thought it was very abrupt. They spent years together! I think she was fond of him. She wanted to make him better.”

She brings up her character’s most controversial storyline: the episode in which Dr Melfi is raped, and ultimately decides not to seek revenge via Tony’s hand. “I was very, very upset with that,” she says now. “I didn’t understand it at all in the beginning. In fact, I read half the script and called David, and I said, ‘Why are you hurting her? Of all people, why would you do this?’ I said, I’m so upset. I couldn’t even finish the script.’ And he said, ‘Well, could you finish it and then call me back?’”

“I was annoyed to death,” she continues. “And then when I got to the last word, it really made me stop and think, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And I realised it was the fork in the road of morality for Dr Melfi. And I called David back. I said, ‘OK, I thought about it. I get it. Goodbye.’ And that was that.”

That, I suppose, is Bracco in a nutshell: forthright, self-possessed – but savvy and flexible when it comes to her own creative choices. “I have no complaints. At 70 years old I feel like I’m still eight – I still wanna do things,” she smiles. That said, she is grateful for the things she’s already done. “I think the thing that kills me is that people are still talking about The Sopranos – and still watching it,” she adds. There are certainly worse things to be remembered for.

‘Monster Summer’ is available on digital platforms now. Distributed by Signature Entertainment