Walk that walk
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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