Actor Tony Sirico is a self-confessed bad guy, best known for his role as Paulie Walnuts on the hit HBO series The Sopranos. He had a few tiffs with the law before entering show business. He was jailed twice for robbing some New York nightclubs in the late 1960s and early 1970s; served part of his time in Sing Sing, where a traveling thespian troupe of ex-cons called The Theater of the Forgotten came to entertain the inmates. While in Sing Sing, he came across a traveling thespian troupe of ex-cons called The Theater of the Forgotten, which ultimately made him decide to be an actor. After he was released from prison, he bagged a Screen Actors Guild nod for his role in the 1974 mobster feature Crazy Joey. The intervening years, however, almost convinced him to do something else since acting didn’t pay a lot. Fortunately, he had a good breaks eventually, especially after being associated with director James Toback. This was followed by four Woody Allen movies, starting with Bullets Over Broadway in 1994. According to him, it seems like he has “done like 45 movies, played 40 gangsters, and five crooked cops. This made him undoubtedly eligible to join an unofficial New York actor group called The Gangsters Actors Guild.
In 1990, Sirico landed a small role in renowned director Martin Scorsese’s classic mob picture Godfellas. This was followed by even more similarly themed roles, such as Susan Seidelman’s Cookie in 1989, John Landis’ Innocent Blood in 1992, and The Search for One-Eye Jimmy in 1996. He also acted with future The Sopranos co-stars Michael Imperioli and Vincent Pastore in John Andrew Gallagher’s The Deli. However, it would on the HBO series where he would reach mainstream popularity.
"When I first read David Chase's script, I knew this was special. This is what I'd been looking for all my life . . . When I heard James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli and Nancy Marchand were in it, I knew it was going to be a total class act. I knew right away this was a role to kill for."