Jamie Lynn Sigler is looking back at how her onscreen father James Gandolfini supported her after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“There were little just moments throughout the show where he would just be [saying], ‘You good, kid? You good, kid?’” Sigler, 45, recalled of her late Sopranos costar during the Thursday, July 9, episode of Danielle Robay’s “Question Everything” podcast. “And it was almost like he was laying the foundation work for me to eventually, when I was bubbling over and just needed to tell someone, [decide on] him being the place to land.”
Sigler ended up leaning on Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack in 2013 at age 51, when she received her MS diagnosis during The Sopranos season 3 in 2001. The health news coincided with struggles in her marriage to Abraxas “A.J.” DiScala, whom she divorced in 2005.
“He finally just pulled me aside and was like, ‘Something is up,’” Sigler recalled. “And then I just unloaded all of it on him, and I remember his first reaction was, ‘You’re just a kid.’ He always tried to remind me, like, ‘You don’t have to know it all. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You’re so young, and this is so big.’”
Gandolfini starred in all six seasons of The Sopranos as mafia crime boss Tony Soprano, while Sigler played his daughter, Meadow. The actress admitted that there were times she wished their father-daughter relationship was real.
“I wanted it to be real,” she explained. “I wanted the moments. And they did. They felt very real. It was, you know, part of the spark and amazingness of the show.”
Sigler was diagnosed with MS when she was 20 years old. However, she kept her health battle a secret for 15 years, publicly revealing her diagnosis in 2016.
Sigler previously revealed that Gandolfini was the only person in the Sopranos cast who knew about her MS for many years.
The podcaster recalled her last conversation with Gandolfini in an exclusive interview for Us Weekly‘s cover story in May while promoting her book, And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope.
“We were at a casino,” she shared. “He looked at me, and he was like, ‘Do you need help walking?’ And I was like, ‘I’m OK right now.’ He was like, ‘All right, you tell me if you do.’ And I was like, ‘I will.’”
Sigler continued, “I remember him being proud, like, ‘OK, look at you. You’re still doing this. You’ve got this.’ It was a beautiful moment that I am very grateful we had because his death was obviously shocking to all of us.”
