Having been taken somewhat aback by that strong, intelligent Drea de Matteo rant I posted the other day, I thought I’d do some Innarnuts sleuthing and edumacate myself a little about the woman. Turns out, her smackdown of limousine-liberal crawly thing Mark Cuban was definitely NOT a one-off.
‘Sopranos’ star Drea de Matteo says she never played Hollywood celebrity ‘game,’ made walking away easy
Drea de Matteo isn’t big on red carpets or hobnobbing with other celebrities.The “Sopranos” star, 52, told Fox News Digital that walking away from the industry was “no big deal,” because she never really felt like she belonged in Hollywood in the first place.
“You know, a lot of people ask me about getting canceled or getting kicked out of Hollywood or shunned. That never happened to me,” she explained. “I wasn’t in there to begin with. I’ve never been a Hollywood player. I’ve done a few acting parts of it on a few TV shows. I’ve done a good job. I even have, you know, some achievement awards and things. But like, I was never really in the industry.”
De Matteo, who played Adriana La Cerva on “The Sopranos,” explained that she has “never played the celebrity game.”
“I don’t own fancy purses and s— like that or walk red carpets. I don’t mingle with famous people. I don’t, it’s just not my world. So, for me to walk away from it, not a big deal.”
Right now, Matteo is focused on her new jewelry collection, which is part of her ULTRAFREE clothing line, joking that the tombstones in her new Tombstone line have name plates on them “in case you forget who you are, just take a look down there.”
Her Protection collection, she explained, has gun pendants.
“What’s funny about that right now is I always wore a revolver, a little tiny revolver with a pearl handle,” she said. “People would give them to me all the time, A, because my ex’s name was Shooter, and B, because I was on ‘The Sopranos,’ and I always wore a bullet hanging from my earring.”
Shooter, of course, would be Shooter Jennings—son of Outlaw Country legend Waylon—to whom Drea was married for a good few years and with whom she has one (1) daughter and one (1) son yclept, wonderfully, “Blackjack.” Now as Fate would have it, I myself have a wee bit of history with Shooter’s dad, to wit:
Just left of center, that’s moi with the facial hair standing behind none other than Ol’ Waylon hisself, who borrowed my black Tele with the fancy tortoise-shell pickguard for an extended jam session with the BPs at the buck-wild Days Of Thunder wrap party thrown by Tom Cruise back in…what, late 1989*, I guess it was? Jessi Colter is clapping along at extreme left, and of course that’s June Carter Cash and her notorious hubby off to the right. We were all so confusticated by the stage-full of country-music royalty we had up there with us we could barely even stand, much less play.
Why yes, it WAS one hell of a damned night, why do you ask?
Anyhoo, bless Drea de Matteo’s heart for speaking out the way she did, and for being the remarkable, level-headed fairer-sex ball o’ Hell she is. Verily, she stands out from the rest of the Tinseltown crowd like the Hope diamond in a red-clay mud bank.
*ERRATA: On further reflection, it musta been 1990, I suppose, since it was right after New Year’s, like January 3th. I remember we all assumed that the only movie types likely to attend would be crew, go-fers, caterers, local production staff, and such-like—surely the stars would have all flown back to H-wood for New Years Eve, right? WRONG! Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Duvall’s lovely Tango-dance instructor, and that big goof Randy Quaid shocked us all by showing up for the shindig. Duvall had slyly arranged to fly in the Cashes, Colter, and Jennings on the sneak as a surprise for Tom, see, without ever letting on; he had met those august personages during the filming of Tender Mercies and become good friends with them. I just about fell over in a dead faint when I saw that tall drink of water Johnny Effing Cash (!!!) come walking in as we were about to tear into our rendition of “Rock And Roll Ruby,” a staple of every BPs set in those days. The minute Cash realized what we were playing, he shot me a huge grin and ploughed thru the crowd to stage-front like Moses parting the Red Sea to take my termbling hand in that great big paw of his and compliment me in his deep, crooning drawl: “Ya sound reeaal gooood, son, just like we did forty years ago!” See, I didn’t know at the time that he had actually written the durn thing—hand to God, I had no idea when I introduced the song with an offhand, “This one goes out to the Man in Black!” Yep, that was one incredible night alright…
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Nicely done Mike!
Oh, it was one for the books for sure. Duvall told me about the whole plot to smuggle in Cash & Co while I was sitting at the Tom Cruise table with him between sets, just chit-chatting idly…WITH EFFING ROBERT DUVALL!!!
To this day, I couldn’t tell you what songs we played with our unexpected onstage guests.
As it happened, my gf at the time, Wendy, had seen Johnny, June, and the rest down at South Park Mall earlier that afternoon and didn’t even recognize them at all; according to Wendy, they were all dressed in turquoise sweatpants and such-like, just hee-hawing around the place like a bunch of yahoos from Kannapolis or someplace. Pretty funny.
Another part I left out coming up in Part Deux…
Tom Cruise put the wrap-party together himself, which was held at the Speedway Club at Charlotte Motor Speedway, where some of the scenes for DoT had been filmed. To this day, I’ve never seen the movie. Nothing whatsoever against Tom Cruise or Robert Duvall, of course, it’s just that I’ve never had the slightest interest in stock-car racing. Can’t stand what is universally known in these parts as “sweet tea” either, I must confess. Same for squirrel huntin’ and fishing. Don’t have a hound dog, a cowboy hat, or a pickup truck, have no plans to acquire any. Have never dated anyone named Darleen, Charleen, Lurleen, or Maureen.
Yep, I’m a traitor to my country for sure, a bad Southerner if ever there was one.
The way we got the wrap party gig in the first place was, Cruise contacted a local talent agency and picked us out of a press-kit lineup of about a hundred or so other bands. Paid us STUPID money for the gig too, Brack still has a copy of the personal check signed by Cruise himself framed and hanging on his office wall.
Best thing of all was that prior to the historic evening, our manager Mike Evans always had to just about bend the arms of bookers and club owners up between their shoulder blades to convince ’em to give us a date. After word of the Tom Cruise whoopjamboreehoo got around, though, all Mike had to do was say on whose behalf he was calling and BOOM, we were booked in a trice.
Then came Karen Schoemer’s glowing review of us in the New York Times, and viola! Our name was gold, our rep secured. All of a sudden-like, Mike had club owners calling HIM. Pretty funny, no?
Even I know who Duvall is, and I’m jealous. He’s one of the few actors I actually like (or think I do anyway 🙂 ).
Good deal. Nice set of friends!
I’ve never watched any stock car movie even though I do like racing anything. Pic is from the exit of turn 4 Charlotte as I pass for the lead 🙂
Oh HELL yeah, Barry! That’s Legends class, right? Or Outlaw, whatever? No wait, Outlaw is dirt. Or…aw hell, the only racing I ever liked or knew anything much about is drag racing, and even that has gotten to be so complicated, over-regulated, and computerized they’ve messed it all up too.
Charlotte has a road course as well as the oval. In fact, the nascar race is now a road course race I believe.
I ran the very first road course race at Charlotte, 1975 IIRC. It rained and none of us had the slightest idea how our slicks were going to work on the banking. It was wild to say the least. Open wheel formula cars in the rain on the banks of a speedway… You can’t see a damn thing if you are behind another car. We all went off the track and into the grass in the infield and somehow three of us ended up at the front for the last lap. I was 3rd that day, and literally blind as we came off of 4 and down to the finish line.
Hmm, nearly 50 years ago if the ’75 is correct. Anyway, it’s within a year. Might have been ’76.
Sports Car Club of America, which has multiple classes of cars, including several formula cars (most famous are the Indy cars and Formula 1 of course, but we’re not quite that fast 🙂 )
One last thing, some inside-baseball stuff regarding life in a rock and roll band that most probably won’t care about but some might find at least mildly interesting:
I mentioned above that Tom Cruise paid us extremely well for the show; in fact, IIRC it remains the second-best payday we had in more than two decades of wandering-minstrelsy. Coming in at Numero Uno Most Lucrative was a wedding in DC for a well-to-do couple who’d met at one of our show/brawl/riots at Double Door in CLT—an experience so unpleasant and demoralizing we never played another wedding again afterwards, despite weddings and private parties being a solid source of income for bands struggling their way up the music-biz ladder.
Weddings were never fun, despite the hopeful assurances of every bride and groom who implored us to play for their event that “really, it won’t be like your usual wedding reception, the older people will leave early and then it’s going to be a real PARTY! You won’t have to play slow songs, polkas, or waltzes, we just want you to do your usual stuff!”
Needless to say, it never, EVER works out that way. The old folks, whose entertainment/socializing options in life have gradually dwindled to A) weddings and B) funerals, would be the very last to leave, glaring sourly out at those deplorable, drunken young fools from their chairs along the back wall until the bitter end. Some of them would have to be asked to leave by venue management before they finally grabbed the coat, hat, handbag, and/or cane and shuffled painfully off to the exit.
In a bootless stab at maintaining some shred of dignity, one thing we flatly refused to do was don the rented tuxedo for these engagements. We always dressed like this was just another Playboys show, which usually netted us a purple-faced upbraiding from the event coordinator/director; she (usually a she) would all but stamp her feet and rip out hanks of her hair at being blandly defied by these four unkempt ruffians and their refusal to bow to her authority and get with the program. We stood our ground and did our thing regardless.
Another perennial irritant was getting requests for, say, Celine Dion’s latest hit (seriously, that happened once; I told the girl I wasn’t plumbed right for it); Snoop Dawg, Fitty, or Luther Vandross; Miley Cyrus; or Barbra Streisand. This, mind, after they’d just heard half an hour or so of nothing but rockabilly, surf, and a smattering of trad-country–not a note of which material implies either familiarity with nor fondness for the requested pop pap to any even half-bright individual. I always politely but firmly informed such supergenii that we were a BAND, not a jukebox; we did NOT take requests; and that if the happy couple had wanted a DJ they woulda hired one. Which, at that point, I was wishing they had.
Bad as all that was, though, the DC shitshow topped ’em all. So extraordinarily godawful was it that, after the ordeal had at long last concluded, the bride and groom felt obliged to present themselves as we were loading out and getting set for the drive up to NYC. They apologized profusely for the fiasco (as we stood waiting to strike up our first number, the officiating clergycritter had used my mic for a short speech wherein he turned to face the four of us and insulted us directly and personally, the smarmy prick; my enraged brother turned to me and suggested that we just down instruments and walk out, and I can’t say he was entirely wrong about that).
A week or two after we’d gotten back home from that particular Northeastern mini-tour, the groom displayed some real class by sending us a whole case of pricey Knob Creek bourbon, by way of making amends. Which, y’know, sufficed quite nicely, and really hit the spot too. Can’t say I recall his name, nor that of the blushing bride, but I remember them fondly nonetheless.
Odd factoid about all those “met at a Playboys show” nuptial gigs: we were asked to play a great many of ’em, and very nearly without exception those marriages ended in divorce sooner or later. I tried to make myself feel guilty about that now and then, as if I ought to’ve warned them about our dismal won-loss record for these deals or something, but I can’t honestly say I ever did. Hey, don’t look at me pal, I’m only the guitar player.
I had no idea weddings could be so bad 🙁
All the ones I’ve been to have actually been fun.
The bourbon would definitely make things better…
For the record, I’m with you on sweet tea Southern style 🙂
I don’t mind a bit of sweetener, but not the typical sweet tea you get in this part of America.
I now understand why Drea de Matteo is not in more shows and movies.
She possesses rare qualities for a former Hollywood-type: brains, a backbone, principles…one other thing: she’s genuinely gorgeous, inside and out.
I have a close friend who worked as a rigger/gaffer/boom mike guy/camera operator on the set of “The Sopranos”. He told me that she is so down-to-earth that it’s stupefying and she would very often have lunch with the crew guys instead of the actors. Said she always had a pack of cigarettes within reach, she was a genuinely good person, never had a bad word to say, and was always on time, ready, and professional.