One star of The Sopranos is responding to theories about what happened to the show’s titular character in the finale.
During the final episode, after six seasons, New Jersey mafia boss Tony Soprano (portrayed by James Gandolfini) is sitting at a Holsten’s diner with his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), and son A.J. (Robert Iler), as they wait for daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler). A few characters then walk into the diner, with Tony appearing to eye someone offscreen — just before the scene cuts to black.
The seemingly ambiguous end to the series left viewers coming up with their own theories about what happened to Tony, including that he was killed by someone in the restaurant. Some fans also said that one man at the diner looked like Davey Scatino, whose life Tony ruined.
In the second season of The Sopranos, Tony exploited his childhood friend’s gambling addiction, resulting in Davey losing his family and his business filing for bankruptcy. So, some fans think Davey had the motive to kill Tony.
The actor who played Davey, Robert Patrick, had no idea that the fan theory existed. He recently told TV Insider that if Davey was the one who killed Tony, he was never told about it.
“David Chase is the only one that knows,” he said, referring to the show’s creator.
“I was never contacted about it. I don’t know. Was there a guy that might have looked like me, or people thought that it was me? … It’s interesting. Yeah, I wonder. I don’t know,” he added.
“I feel blessed that people would really still be thinking about my character at the end. But boy, what a great experience,” he said.
Patrick, who starred in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The X-Files, appeared in three episodes of The Sopranos during its second season.
Fans have speculated about the meaning of the series’s ambiguous ending since it aired in 2007, though Chase has not confirmed whether Tony lives or dies when the screen cuts to black.
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“But I had no idea it would be that much of an uproar. And was it annoying? What was annoying was how many people wanted to see Tony killed. That bothered me,” Chase told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.
Last year, he told TV Insider that he wanted to imply that Tony could die in that diner, “not that he did die.”
In another interview, he said was thinking about how “the universe goes on and on.”
“You may not go on and on but the universe is going to go on and on. The movie’s going to keep going,” he said.