Multi-award-winning versatile actress Edie Falco is probably best known for her iconic role of Carmela Soprano in The Sopranos. While her performance in that ground-breaking series won her near-universal critical acclaim and multiple awards, Falco’s latest role in I’ll Be Right There offers up a character who she feels is so much more relatable than the glamorous multi-layered Carmela Soprano.
Carmela, the wife of a mob boss, lived a life of privilege, luxury, and moral ambiguity. As a character, she was intensely layered, at every turn wrestling with her complicity in husband Tony’s criminal empire even as she tried to hold on to her own personal and religious values. Carmela, despite the wealth and status, is in a gilded cage, most times not sure whether she is powerful or powerless. Carmela’s world was multi-dimensional and complex, and yet so removed from the life that most of us have known as to make personal identification with her difficult.
On the other hand, Falco’s character in I’ll Be Right There is closer to the real everyday world. Although details of the series are still emerging, it has been said that the character is an ordinary one attempting to make ends meet via work, relationships, and family responsibilities. This again makes her more approachable and relatable to a greater audience.
Indeed, Falco has herself admitted that this latest role gave her the opportunity to tap into more inhibited emotions and challenges faced by normal people. According to a recent interview, she says, “There’s a certain quiet strength in characters like this-something that doesn’t always come with fireworks or dramatic confrontations. It’s about dealing with life’s little battles, which I think we all can understand.”
This makes Falco’s new character all the more interesting: the grand world of mob politics and money falls into the more palatable and sympathetic challenges that real people must face. Many people can grab bits of their own lives that are reflected in her character’s struggle; this was not necessarily always possible with Carmela’s story. Falco takes the much more accessible role in it and again shows her range as an actress can easily go from super humane to the very ordinary with ease.
