Until an early-2010s casting bonanza rendered such complaints largely outdated — Kiernan Shipka on Mad Men, Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner on Game of Thrones, and Holly Taylor on The Americans all proved capable of holding down tremendously demanding adult material seemingly with ease — the common rap on child actors who aged into becoming main characters was that they were kind of a waste of everyone’s time. Iler got it as bad as anyone, especially because relative to his on-screen sister, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, his best material didn’t come until much later in the series.
But just as random Italian-American character actors like Tony Sirico, Vincent Curatola, and Steven R. Schrripa were given the material of their careers by this show and ably rose past their background-character origins to meet the challenge, so did Iler. His part is much less cool and funny and scary and glamorous than the gangsters, which is what makes it so brave. Unlike virtually everyone else on the show, he didn’t have any bedrock of thrilling criminality on which to base his performance and trust that the audience would put up with it. He just went there, all in, right into the deep end. In the process he showed me myself. It’s not a flattering portrait, but The Sopranos doesn’t show us as we wish we were. It shows us as we wish we weren’t.
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