He Keeps It Light Among the Heavies on ‘Sopranos’

In their first scene together on “The Sopranos,” Steven Schirripa, who plays Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, is sitting in the waiting room at the eye doctor’s with Dominic Chianese, who plays Corrado “Junior” Soprano. Junior has just been released from prison after a high-profile arrest. Bacala, a mammoth of a human being with a gut the size of Mt. St. Helens, is the crew guy assigned by Tony Soprano to be his uncle’s caretaker-errand boy.

Junior: “You see me on TV?”

Bacala: “You were on TV? What show?”

Junior: “Evening news.”

Bacala: “Oh yeah, that. What about it?”

Junior: “How’d I look? Be honest.”

Bacala: “You looked, you know, like you. You looked good.”

Junior: “I didn’t like the way I looked. Maybe I should get new frames--what you think?”

Of all the relationships on “The Sopranos,” the one between Junior and Bacala is arguably the least complex or integral to the plot. But you sense that the show’s writers, in stumbling upon this pairing, have discovered the comic possibilities in the banter between a fading former Mafia capo, confined to his house by the Feds and sick with cancer, and the slightly dense but well-meaning underling killer forced to baby-sit him.

Off the set, Schirripa, 43, has a wife and two daughters and lives in Las Vegas. “Where I live, they ride horses down the street,” he says, asked how far off the Strip he is.

If the secret of “The Sopranos” success lies partly in the fact that the show has been cast with actors who don’t seem plucked from spinning classes at a Hollywood gym, then Schirripa falls firmly in this tradition.

Born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, Schirripa has spent much of his adult life in Las Vegas, where he worked as a bouncer at a club owned by singer Paul Anka and then as a maitre d’ in the showroom at the Riviera Hotel.

This was back in the pre-Ticketmaster days, when if you wanted a good seat you had to “grease” somebody, Schirripa says. In 1994, he became the hotel’s entertainment director, booking comics and singers, a job he retained until last year, by which time he’d become a “Sopranos” regular.

Asked why he moved to Vegas in the first place, Schirripa says: “Don’t ask me why it’s a good question.” He says it kind of cryptically, without punctuation, like a wise guy. He says other things in that wise guy way--as when he’s describing what he does now, as a “consultant” to the hotel. “I just help them out, you know?” he says. “However we want to put it.”

In other words, Bacala is a role that Schirripa has evidently been rehearsing for some time. Comics and managers who have worked with him over the years are both cheering him on and shaking their heads, amazed that Schirripa the booker has a hotter career going than many of the acts he used to put onstage. “Ninety percent of the reaction of the entertainment community is a laugh, and good for you,” says talent manager Rick Messina, among the supporters.

Schirripa was the first to headline Messina’s client Drew Carey in Las Vegas, and Carey later returned the favor by casting Schirripa in his comedy special, “Mr. Vegas.”

“The comedy world has just a handful of bookers and buyers who distribute most of the personal appearance work for all of the guys,” says Messina, a former booker himself and now a partner in the management firm Messina Baker. “Most of them are hustlers and snakes, and they’ll just do anything to make a buck. . . . So for one of them to break with an on-camera career bigger than the acts he hires is amazing. But Steve was always a bigger-than-life character.”

‘His Personality Is So Funny’

Schirripa is big, but he is not as large as the character he plays on “The Sopranos” (that’s not his actual gut; it’s a fat suit). He has traded on his look in small film roles. There was “beefy jerk” (“Detroit Rock City”), “goon” (“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”), “man in bar” (“Casino”) and “hood” (“Joe Dirt”). He played himself in “Welcome to Hollywood,” a low-low-budget mockumentary about an aspiring actor that was made in 1997 by Tony Markes and Adam Rifkin. The two were making the movie on weekends, and one segment called for shooting in Las Vegas. Rifkin and Markes contacted Schirripa.

“Tony said, ‘If we put this guy in the movie, we can get a really nice suite [at the Riviera] for free,” says Rifkin. Schirripa was supposed to get only a line or two, but “his personality is so funny” that Rifkin contrived a bigger role, in which Schirripa played a Vegas entertainment director trying desperately to break into the movies. “His whole shtick was saying, ‘The camera’s rolling now, right?’ ” Rifkin says.

By the time Schirripa auditioned for “The Sopranos” in June 1999, he had an agent and he’d been taking acting classes. But he was still officially the entertainment director at the Riviera when he went to New York for the wedding of a friend, “Saturday Night Live” writer Hugh Fink. While there, he figured he’d audition for the hottest show going. “The Sopranos” was between its first and second seasons, and Schirripa read for the role of the FBI agent who would be wiring Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bompensiero, a key plot point in Season 2.

He was turned down, but Georgianne Walken, the show’s casting director, asked him to come back several days later to read for a different character, Bacala. The role was a local hire, Schirripa was told, meaning he’d have to pay his own way back from Vegas. Schirripa was suspicious; he’d done his share of day-player goombah roles and wasn’t sure he needed another, even if it was on “The Sopranos.”

But Schirripa says his wife persuaded him to give it a shot, and this time he auditioned for series creator David Chase and the show’s writers. He and Chianese did the doctor’s office scene, and the next day Schirripa was told he would be a recurring character.

Still, “there was no guarantee” when Schirripa would be needed. For this reason, he decided not to tell the Riviera that he had a part on “The Sopranos.” When he got a call from the show, he simply boarded a plane for New York, paying the fare, he says.

When the show called, “I would tell my secretary I was going to lunch, and I would get on a plane and go to New York. There were times where I just snuck off. . . . And then I would call her and say, ‘Hey, I’m in New York. Cover me.’ ”

In this way, Schirripa says, he used up six weeks of vacation.

These days, Schirripa has an apartment in New York when “The Sopranos” is shooting. He appeared as a bumbling hit man in the recent release “See Spot Run.” He’ll still make arrangements for managers hoping to get their comics booked at the Riviera. But his attention is on a different kind of work, a different kind of room.