In recent years, Edie Falco has become a mother and fought a very private battle with breast cancer. She tells Hermione Hoby how Carmela Soprano and Nurse Jackie have helped her stay strong
When The Sopranos ended in 2007, it seemed impossible that we'd ever think of Edie Falco as anyone other than Carmela. She'd played Mrs Tony Soprano, mobster wife, for eight years in HBO's cultural juggernaut of a series, winning three Emmys and two Golden Globes in the process. Falco seemed destined to be for ever "Carmela" in the way that Lisa Kudrow is for ever "Phoebe".
But then she was cast as Nurse Jackie. The comedy, now on its third series, is set in a Manhattan emergency room where Falco presides as a stoic, imperturbable nurse with a robust disregard for bureaucracy and a ferocious addiction to prescription painkillers. With her grim practicality and utilitarian haircut, Jackie seems a world away from the materialistic, voluptuously coiffed Carmela but both characters share a delicious moral dubiousness.
The first episode ? in which Jackie forges an organ donor card, steals from a rich patient to give to a poor one and flushes the severed ear of a violent diplomat down the toilet ? won her an Emmy. It made Falco the first female actor to win one for comedy as well as drama but if anything validates the "best television actress of her generation" tag, it's simply that people in the street now shout "Nurse Jackie" rather than "Carmela".
I meet Falco in her local New York cafe and she strides in looking trim and vigorous. The spiked crop is pushed back under a headband and she seems formidably together, particularly in comparison with Jackie's chaos.
"I am, yeah," she nods. "Having been there myself I know that the alternative is yucky and I see how different my life is as a result of getting myself together." Falco, now 47, has been sober for 20 years after giving up alcohol. "It proved to me that I don't have to be a mess to do what I do," she says, her large light blue eyes fixing me. "Which is a big question a lot of addicts have ? like "Oh, it's my muse" or whatever excuse you tell yourself to keep drinking. It sort of cleans the channel from where you get your inspiration, unclouds the way. It takes what it takes to find these things out."
Before Nurse Jackie, she kept getting cast as wives and mothers, "and at the time I was neither. I thought, what if I was just a woman? And then this came along and ? I never really connected it until actually right now ? I realise it was what I had asked for."
Jackie is a wife and mother, albeit the kind who grinds painkillers into powder and snorts them before preparing her kids' cereal. But the show, says Falco, "is really just about this woman's struggle to get through the day".
When asked who's tougher, Jackie or her, she barely hesitates: "I think I'm tougher actually, for sure," she nods. "And my toughness was hard-won so I can stand behind everything I say and do. I get impatient with her denial; I just want to say, you've got a marriage, kids at stake, just get it together, enough already!"
Falco grew up in Brooklyn ? "a sensitive kid growing up in an imperfect environment, I'll just leave it at that" ? and seeing her mother do community theatre made her want to act.
"I used to think it was the coolest thing in the world, that she had her job in the day and then in the evening she and a bunch of other grownups would put on costumes and act things out. It was the most preposterous thing, magic from beginning to end."
Falco graduated from the acting programme at the State University of New York at Purchase in 1986, but it was a long time before she was able to support herself through acting alone. There was secretary work, "waitressing for a gazillion years" and also a stint in a Cookie Monster costume.
"Oh God," she says, closing her eyes and grimacing. I apologise for bringing back the memories. "It's all right, it's OK, they're never very far away. So yeah, I dressed up as Cookie Monster. At a wedding. To get people up on to the dance floor. But I got $75 a wedding and that was huge back then. Uhhh," she exhales, with a little head shake, "I still can't believe those days really are behind me."
The Sopranos ensured that they were. Falco quickly became a household name, but did her best to avoid the fuss around the show. "My mom would call and say, 'Oh I was reading on a website . . .' and I'd say [she puts on a stern voice]: 'Mom? I can't go there.' It wasn't until it ended that I became more aware of just what it was and what it meant to people. It's just hugely flattering."
In 2003, midway through filming a season, Falco was diagnosed with breast cancer. "At 11 o'clock I got the diagnosis and I had to be at work at one," she says. "It was important for me to go through it privately. I have great respect for people who can go out there and proclaim it but that's not how I do things."
She told her family and close friends, who include the show's producers ? both women in their 40s. They duly scheduled Falco's filming around chemo appointments and saw that she had a wig to play Carmela in. "It was perfect for me," says Falco. "The more I was able to just show up for my job, the more healthy I stayed. You kind of become what people expect of you, so if nobody knows and they're like, 'Buck up!' then that's what I'll do."
As for surviving cancer, "I had all these large thoughts and I'm embarrassed to say they kinda went away. You start out with all these grand proclamations and here it is, almost eight years later, and I still bitch about the same stuff, still complain about my wardrobe or whatever."
But motherhood has also prompted some of those large thoughts. Falco has two adopted kids, six-year-old Anderson and three-year-old Macy.
"I wonder how did I ever manage without being a mom, you know? I get so much nourishment from being around these guys. I have an odd, cosmic feeling about it ? we're all the mothers to all the children, all here to raise each other and take care of each other."
They get excited when they see her face on the subway or sides of buses. But, she says, "the weirdest thing was two summers ago: I'm in the Hamptons, bouncing my baby in a swimming pool and there's an aeroplane going by with a banner with Nurse Jackie on it . . . it was just too bizarre. We go and do our job and go home and you forget that it's being recorded and millions of people are seeing it. That piece of it is something I don't think about so much. Until somebody comes at me with that kind of grin as if I'm something other than human."
When she leaves a young guy recognises her and accosts her, thrilled. I think he's grinning because onscreen and off, she is nothing but human.
Nurse Jackie is on Sky Atlantic HD every Tuesday at 10pm.
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