10 Actors You Didn’t Realise Were In The Sopranos

By Gearoid Gillett /

5. Hal Holbrook

Episode: Season Six: €˜The Fleshy Part of the Thigh€™ The Academy Award nominated actor features in one episode of the sixth season. When Tony suffers a near-fatal gunshot from Junior, he spends several weeks in hospital. When Tony comes out of his existentialist coma he meets the Lincoln star. Holbrook plays a physicist who clues Tony into the interconnectivity of all life, telling him how no event or entity can be understood independent from the rest of the world €“ how €˜everything is connected€™. Holbrook€™s musings on quantum physics are lost on Paulie Walnuts who during a bad signalled boxing match on satellite TV abruptly challenges: €˜you€™re so f***in€™ smart, fix the TV!€™ This is all taken in by Tony who is going through an existential and spiritual awakening which is welcomed after hearing a pastor€™s creationist ideas. Holbrook went on to star in Sean Penn€™s Into the Wild the following year as Ron, the lonely leather worker who passes his trade onto Alexander Supertramp (Emile Hirsch) and offers to adopt him as his grandchild. Holbrook€™s touching performance earned an Academy Award nomination the in 2007 but lost out to Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men.