Alec Baldwin reveals the 'Sopranos' role he pitched but never got to play

The Sopranos signed off June 10, 2007—nearly 14 years ago—with Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) vaguely sitting down to dinner with his family at a diner before abruptly fading to black.

Alec Baldwin still thinks he could have added some oomph.

"I called up whoever it was…and said…there’s only one man in this business who should come in, whack Jimmy, and ride off with Edie [Falco], and I am that man," Baldwin told Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, who starred on the iconic HBO drama, during the Talking Sopranos podcast. "They were like, 'Sure, great. We'll add your name to the list of all the Irish actors who think that they should be on The Sopranos.'"

The Sopranos was created by David Chase, whom Baldwin once had an awkward encounter with in a Los Angeles bathroom: "I'm holding my shirt up to the mechanical dryer, and the door opens, and ... this is my introduction to David Chase. He goes, 'Alec Baldwin? What the f—k are you doing, drying your shirt in the bathroom at the Four Seasons restaurant?’ And I think based on that alone, I was never cast on your show."

Chase dissected the open-ended final scene with Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. in January 2019:

"It's for people to decide for themselves," the 75-year-old writer and producer said. "I had another scene that was going to be Tony’s death, that we were going to do. That was two years or three years before we came up with the other one. So, there was a death scene. Tony drives back into the Lincoln tunnel, he goes for a meeting with Phil Leotardo, and he's killed. I don't think you were going to see the death, but you were going to know that he was dead."

In the same Deadline piece, writer Terence Winter offered insight:

"My interpretation was that, when you’re Tony Soprano, even going out for ice cream with your family is fraught with paranoia. He’s sown a life of murder, mayhem and treachery. And everybody who walks in, a guy in a Member’s Only jacket…this could be the guy, or that could be the guy. You’re always looking over your shoulder and at some point, whether it happened that night or not, when you live that life, one day, somebody’s going to walk out of a men’s room and that’s it for you. As we know famously from gangsters, they always say there’s only two ways to get out of this: one’s jail, the other’s dead. So maybe it happened that night, and maybe it didn’t. It really didn’t matter. At some point, something bad’s going to happen to this guy and maybe it was that night. And maybe not."

The Sopranos ran for six seasons from 1999 to 2007 and became one of the most acclaimed and debated series in all of television, including 21 Primetime Emmy Awards.

Watch Baldwin's full Talking Sopranos episode—all two hours and 49 minutes of it!—below.