About Gandolfini's (Jamie's) teen years: 'Julie had an off-and-on flirtation with Jamie, “like middle school love,†she said. “It started
petering out in high school. He went off to college and I really didn’t see him again.†But she doesn’t
remember him ever being serious about a girl. Girls maybe he was serious about, but not a girl. He
never stuck with one girl through a whole year. Gandolfini would be voted “Best Looking†and
“Biggest Flirt†in his senior year, and those jokey titles really seem to have been pretty well
accepted, at least in retrospect. Whatever his appeal was to girls in those days, it was “nothing like
the appeal he had on The Sopranos,†Luce says. “That was a role he was playing. It was completely
out of character for the guy we knew in school.â€'
But did Luce really know the Jamie she went to high school with? -
'And yet, he acknowledged several times that he’d made Tony [Soprano] up out of his own biography. “The
character is a good fit,†Gandolfini said. “Obviously, I’m not a mobster, and there’s other aspects of
the guy I’m not familiar with, like how comfortable he is with violence. But in most of the ways that
count, I have to say, yeah—the guy is me.'"