10 Mob Movie Actors Who Were Actually There
2. Tony Sirico - Goodfellas
Best known as Paulie Walnuts in David Chase's seminal HBO classic The Sopranos, Tony Sirico had been busy cutting his cloth as a minor supporting player in dozens of pictures since the early 1970s, even appearing in a small, uncredited capacity in 1974's The Godfather: Part II.
Sirico made his screen debut as an extra that same year in Crazy Joe and quickly established himself as a regular in crime films. Again, though, the subject matter of these projects wouldn't have felt distant for Sirico, who before beginning his career as an actor was arrested on 28 separate occasions and had a "reputation as a stick-up artist" in his childhood neighbourhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Sirico had two stretches in prison - one for illegal possession of a firearm, the other for armed robbery - and it was during one of these stints that his interest in acting began.
As per a 1990 profile in the Los Angeles Times, Sirico was bitten by the acting bug after seeing a performance from ex-convict actors. In his own words, "I watched them and thought, 'I can do that'", explaining that the skills he'd gained surviving on the street and in prison had already made him well accustomed to theatrics.
Sirico made a name for himself as a bit player in the mob genre, notably featuring in Goodfellas, Cop Land, and Mickey Blue Eyes across the 1990s, but found his greatest mob role on TV as Paulie Gualtieri in The Sopranos. A fan-favourite in every sense of the word, Sirico was an essential part of the genre's scenery for several decades, and there's no doubt his time on the streets made a huge contribution to that.