Edie Falco has completed a circle of sorts in her 20-year career on television.
She started, indelibly, as mob boss wife Carmela Soprano on “The Sopranos,” an extensive physical transformation that included the application of press-on nails and the teasing of the hair and the wearing of a crucifix on a gold chain. With her new CBS series, “Tommy,” Falco, 56, moves to the opposite side of the law, playing Abigail “Tommy” Thomas, the daughter of a New York City cop who not only became a cop herself but who moves to LA to become that city’s first female chief of police.
Her wardrobe is a blazer and trousers — or a cop uniform.
“I’m so happy. The preparation time is minimal,” says Falco in a cafe near her West Village home. “Those uniforms are made out of plastic or something. I mean, you do take on a certain part when you wear that thing. It’s funny. You’re not allowed to leave the set when you’re wearing the uniform. It’s a real thing about people mistaking you for a real cop.”
If the new series seems off-brand for Falco — who won four Emmys playing edgy characters such as Carmela and Jackie Peyton, the drug-addicted lead character of Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” — the actress is candid about having clocked enough hours “running around naked and cursing” on cable.
“I sometimes relish rules,” she says. “I find more freedom with some confines. Nudity and bad language are two things we have to steer clear of on the show, but we can still portray characters who are interesting and complicated. Can somebody get angry without cursing? What does that look like? What does it say about her that bad language is not part of her vocabulary?”
For Tommy, a misfit in image-driven LA with her New Yawk accent and broadside manner, finessing a situation is what she does best. The veteran cops don’t respect her, but she knows how to speak their language.
“She’s been around these guys her whole life,” Falco says. “She knows what it’s like to be a cop. She has an ease with men like this where she feels that it doesn’t have to be a confrontation.”
Where she fails is as a parent. Tommy let her daughter, Kate (Olivia Lucy Phillip), move across the country to live with her father when she was only 14, and the show explores their tentative reconciliation. They sometimes don’t know what to say to each other. “Mother-daughter things under the best circumstances are difficult,” Falco says. “She’s also a grandmother to a kid she doesn’t know. She’s way out of her element.”
The reason you want to sit down with Falco is because she is the real deal. She bears not a trace of the corporate media training that have turned even intelligent actors into machines that merely spit press releases.
“I never know what I’m supposed to say or not supposed to say but who cares?,” she says. Tommy is gay, and while Falco had no qualms about playing that aspect of the character, she was abashed about her first stage kiss. “I told the actress who becomes my girlfriend, ‘I want you to know that’s the first time I kissed a woman.’ She said, ‘Are you kidding?’”
This story prompts Falco to recall her very first kiss, from a boy, in a junior high school production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “During rehearsal, he leaned in to kiss me, and I almost passed out because I had never been kissed. Everybody laughed at me, and I turned bright red.”
Falco has been so successful for so long now that it’s hard to imagine that she never thought she’d work as an actress when she was a student at SUNY Purchase, the gritty girl among a surfeit of ingenues. “I still can’t believe what’s happening,” she says. “I have a great deal of gratitude on a moment-to-moment basis about what I get to do for living. It hasn’t gotten old yet.”
If it ever does, her kids, Anderson, 15, and Macy, 11, know how to keep Mom humble. “I said to my son the other day, ‘Anderson, you know what I do for a living, right?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you put on other people’s clothes and you pretend you’re somebody else.’ I said, ‘All right. What’s the name of the show I’m working on?’ He said, ‘Tony’?”
With that, Falco bursts into laughter: “They couldn’t care less.”
