‘The Sopranos’ guest star remembers really getting “beaten up by Paulie Walnuts” due to mishap with lead pipe

Here’s one of those rare cases where you almost want getting beaten up by a gangster.

Actor Chris Diamantopoulos, guest appearance on HBO The sopranos as Jason Barone, a family friend of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), recalled the time a scene involving a prop rubber pipe went wrong and he “got beaten up by Paulie Walnuts and lived to tell about it.”

Diamantopoulos appeared in 2006 in “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh”, the fourth episode of the sixth season. Unaware of his late father’s Mafia connections, Jason goes against Tony’s wishes and is quickly met with revenge (literally): a visit from Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri (Tony Sirico) and a lead pipe.

Related: Lorraine Bracco reveals what she thinks happens to Tony afterward Sopranos The ending broke her heart.

“Sirico had two pipes, a lead pipe and a rubber pipe, one for use when the camera was on me and one for use when the camera was on him,” Diamantopoulos said PEOPLE in an interview related to his role at Amazon The sticky one. “What do you think he used on me the first time?” The answer is that it wasn’t the fake.

“It was a rite of passage getting beaten by Paulie Walnuts,” he added.

Almost 26 years have passed since then The sopranos The film first premiered on HBO in January 1999 and became a massive hit, running for six seasons. Newly crowned Golden Globe nominee Cristin Milioti (HBO’s The penguin) recalled her own experience as a guest star playing John Sacrimoni’s daughter Catherine. She admitted that she “ended up eating the prop shrimp” because she didn’t know what craft services were.

Related: The sopranosJames Gandolfini cut short his intervention and challenged HBO exec to fire him: ‘Aw, f— that’

The show came back into conversation last year when creator David Chase returned to the Holsten’s ice cream shop in New Jersey, where they filmed the final scene of the entire series. “See who came by to visit us on the 17th anniversary of the last episode!” reads the caption on Holsten’s social media account: “When we asked him what he thought of the stand, he said: ‘He looks good!'”

Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby “Baccala” Baccalieri, was also inspired by his gangster role The sopranos for a recent Freshpet commercial that premiered during Netflix NFL games on Christmas Day. The nostalgia is still alive.

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