Nine Secrets of 'The Sopranos'

7. Tony Sirico laid down some ground rules for playing Paulie.

Last season, Paulie Walnuts went on a most un-goodfella-like crying jag after learning that his beloved mother was actually his aunt; his real mother was the nun he believed to be his aunt, who gave him up as a newborn because of the potential scandal. Sirico never would have felt comfortable with that kind of bawling when the show first started. ''When Tony first started, he didn't like his hair messed up,'' says Chase. ''I think he didn't want to look silly.'' He also had some other rules: ''I told David I won't play a rat, and I'm not big on gay scenes,'' remembers Sirico. ''And he understood. It was an unwritten clause in my contract.''

But over the years, Chase started giving him more to do, and he rose to the challenge. ''Little by little he got into that comic personality, and he's just great at it,'' says Chase. ''I love watching Paulie, I could watch him forever.'' Sirico himself is surprised to see what kind of an actor he's turned into. ''I didn't even think I could get there,'' he says about his tearful histrionics. ''But I get there. I've been an actor for so many years, but they always put a gun in my hands. Those guys don't cry. They scream and panic when they get killed, so I know how to die.''

8. Livia was to be a big part of season 3.

Though Nancy Marchand was only on The Sopranos for two seasons (she passed away in 2000 from lung cancer and emphysema), her character — Tony's manipulative, passive-aggressive mom, Livia — lives on in every one of her son's therapy sessions. But Marchand's run was actually one year longer than Chase had expected: The first season followed a storyline he'd originally conceived when he envisioned The Sopranos as a movie. ''It was gonna be a feature about a gangster in therapy, his mother, and his shrink,'' says Chase. And by the end of the first season, ''that [arc] was over. And then, lo and behold, HBO renewed it for a second season, and it was, 'Oh, my God, what are we gonna do now?''' Livia had paired with Uncle Junior to have Tony whacked, which made any future mother/son scenes very unlikely. ''Once a mother has tried to have her child killed, that child is never gonna forgive her,'' says Chase.

Tony didn't see Livia until the second season's finale, when he gave her stolen airplane tickets to get out of his life. She was arrested with the hot tickets at the airport, which would have brought them together in season 3. ''She would have had to testify in court,'' says Chase. ''He would have been trying to get on her good side, because she could bury him legally. Not intentionally, but just by shooting off her mouth about her crazy crap while she was in court.''

Livia's corrosive legacy may live on in the story, but Marchand's inspiration as an actress does, too. ''We think about her all the time,'' says Chase. ''She was a great influence on all of us. She was an old pro, and very upright. Tough.''

9. David Chase finds the show's dream sequences ''ham-handed.''

As dream scenes goes, The Sopranos' first was Freud 101: Tony having sexual fantasies about Dr. Melfi. But as the series progressed, these onscreen dreams became more complex, surreal, and fragmented: Big Pussy talked to Tony as a fish; a post-rape Dr. Melfi had her arm stuck in a soda machine while a dog menaced her; and then there was Tony's two-episode coma, imagining himself as a salesman stuck in Costa Mesa. ''In comparison to, say, David Lynch's, I find our dreams kind of ham-handed,'' says Chase. ''But there's a difference in that he's dealing with the unconscious, and because we have this psychiatry show, we're dealing with the subconscious. Those dreams are there to be interpreted, because there's a therapist there. I don't say those interpretations are accurate, or that's what the dreams mean, but our dreams sometimes carry story points. Sometimes fairly obvious story points. Movies with dreams that I like best don't necessarily do that.''

''Although,'' he adds. ''Maybe David Lynch would say, 'There are story points in all the stuff I did, you just didn't see it.'''