The Sopranosguest star says Tony Sirico hit him with a real pipe: Got whacked by Paulie Walnuts

Don’t mess with Paulie Walnuts.Chris Diamantopoulos, who guest starred on the final season of “The Sopranos,” recently revealed that Tony Siricio — who played mobster Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri on the hit show — accidentally “whacked” him with a real pipe during a scene.“Sirico had two pipes, a lead pipe and a rubber pipe, one to use when the camera was on me, and one to use when the camera was on him,” Diamantopoulos, 49, recalled in an interview with PEOPLE published Wednesday.“Which one do you think he used on me the first time? The answer is it wasn’t the fake one,” Diamantopoulos said.The actor joked, “It was a rite of passage to be whacked by Paulie Walnuts.”Diamantopoulos appeared in the fourth episode of the show’s sixth and final season in 2006 as Jason Barone, a family friend of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).“I remember doing a scene with him where he was in the hospital.

His character had to have stabbing pains in his abdomen,” Diamantopoulos recalled of his time working with Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack in 2013.“I remember him outside on a break, looking for a particular stone.He wanted to find a jagged rock, and he hid it under his hospital gown and had his arm over it so that when it called for the character to be in pain,” Diamantopoulos continued, noting that Gandolfini “pushed his arm down and the rock dug into his gut, and it gave him a chance to react to it.” “I thought that was really a practical effect,” said Diamantopoulos.

“A really neat thing to see.” Sirico has also passed away since the show ended.He died at age 79 in July 2022.David Chase, who created the beloved series, remembered Sirico after his death and how much he enjoyed writing for the late actor’s role.“It was because of what he did with that stuff.

You’d write a line, and then he’d do it, and the look on his face would be so incredibly laughable, and funny,” Chase, 79, told Rolling Stone afte...