Matthew Del Negro has been a professional actor in television, film, theatre, and commercials for a decade. Most notably, he appeared as cousin Brian Cammarata, Tony’s financial advisor, on HBO’s smash hit The Sopranos. Aside from the award-winning cast of The Sopranos, he has worked with such esteemed veterans as Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Darren Starr, Joe Mantagne, and Chad Lowe among others. In the recent past, he has been seen on stage Off-Broadway opposite Tom Everett Scott and in several national network commercials including the award-winning Miller Lite “bartender” spot.
Recent television guest spots include The West Wing, Law & Order, Joan of Arcadia, Navy NCIS, Whoopi, MTV’s Damage Control, Tempting Adam for Oxygen, All My Children, and recurring roles on The Guiding Light and As the World Turns. Last season, he booked the CBS pilot Cooking Lessons directed and produced by legendary filmmaker Ivan Reitman. He recently wrapped shooting on the independent films Why George and The Development and was an invited actor at the prestigious O’Neill Playwright’s Conference. More information is available at http://matthewdelnegro.com.
It really was at the end of college. My dramatic incident was that I was in Italy for the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I was studying over there and my girlfriend at the time was studying over there as well. She basically dumped me while we were in Italy. I started doing a lot of writing. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. The summer before, my friend and I had driven cross-country and the whole way, I was thinking, “What do I want to do? What do I want to do? I want to do something that I love.” My father is a lawyer, my mom is a teacher, and I’ve always kind of thought that I would do one of those things. I liked the idea of both of those careers. I always figured I’d become a lawyer and then I realized eventually that I’d just rather play a lawyer on TV.
Was your family supportive?
Oh, yeah. I’ve got to give a shout-out to my parents! I went to Boston College—expensive school—and then I said I was going to be an actor. It was huge, but they couldn’t have been more supportive. The whole time, I think they knew that I wasn’t going to screw around if I said I was going to do this. They were very supportive. My dad has been to way too many of the little shows I’ve done. I know a lot of people’s parents who aren’t supportive of this life choice. I don’t think I take it for granted, but I’m sure I do. I feel bad saying, “Don’t come to so many performances. I need to grow.” I’ve had to have that conversation with them.
How did you get started as an actor?
I had never done anything in high school or anything beyond the senior class picking me to play a game show host in some senior act. I had always played sports and never had anything to do with the theatre. When I was in Italy, dumped, starting to do some writing in my journal, all of a sudden a lot of stuff came out. I started to think, “Maybe I want to write. Maybe I want to do something artistic or creative.” I took a real one-eighty. I had been playing lacrosse at Boston College and, when I was out of my element in Europe, I really thought, “Do I really want to be playing lacrosse anymore?” That was part of my identity at school. It was great and I had a great time doing it, but I started thinking that maybe I wanted to do something else.
When I first got to BC, I was a Psych major because I figured I liked psychology, just learning about people. But when I started taking psych classes, I realized it was just kind of putting labels on things that I felt like I already knew. That wasn’t so appealing to me. By default, somehow, I wound up an English major. So, that worked with being in Italy and feeling like I wanted to write. In that journal, I was questioning what I wanted to do and one of the things I listed as a possibility was ACTOR. That was the first trace of it. So, I got back to school and started playing lacrosse again, but was still mulling over whether I wanted to do it or not. Finally, after a lot of thought and a lot of angst, I went to my coach and said, “I think I’m done.” It was a big deal. Now it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but it was a huge deal at the time.
That winter, my roommate and I decided we were going to go out for the play. He had never done theatre either. We both auditioned. He ended up getting one of the leads. I didn’t even get a callback. A month later, I auditioned for a play and I ended up getting the lead in it, but it was literally a play that was done in a lecture hall for two nights. It was Hello Out There by William Saroyan. I played a guy who wakes up in jail and has allegedly raped this woman. I had to say, “Hello out there,” about four hundred times. It was a great experience and I loved it. I said, “This is what I’m going to do!”
I started taking acting classes at BC, started taking film classes—I ended up getting a Film Studies minor—and I knew nothing about film. I had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark like twenty times—because that’s the movie we got when we got our VCR when I was a kid—but I was so behind on any kind of film history. I had a reality check my senior year on Christmas break. I said to my cousin, “What am I doing? I say I’m going to be an actor. I did one play.” He gave me great advice. He said, “How old are you?” I said, “I’m twenty-one.” He said, “Okay, so if you do this for three years and you get nowhere, then you’re twenty-four and you go get a real, nine-to-five job.” I was like, “All right. If I do this for three years and I really put my mind to it, I know I’m not going to get nowhere.” That was the best advice. What that did was give me the right to go ahead. Once I was doing it, there was no way I was going to stop at three years if nothing had happened.
How did you get your first agent?
I stayed at home in Pound Ridge, saved up some money, started taking commercial classes in the City twice a week, taking the train in and out. And eventually I moved into the City. I got into a scene study class which my cousin, Artie Tobia, was in—this is the same cousin that advised me to give it three years. That class, that spring, we ended up doing a showcase of scenes and monologues for industry people in a black box theatre. I had no “in” into this business except for an actor named Pat Collins. He did a youth group in my hometown in high school. He’s a great guy and he was kind of my mentor. He said, “I’ll introduce you to my commercial agent, but not yet. You gotta do stuff first.” He eventually introduced me to his agent at SEM&M and I felt good. They liked me and started sending me out for commercials. My current commercial agent I actually got because I ran into a guy that I went to high school with, randomly, and he was like, “Oh, I know a girl who’s an assistant at Paradigm. Does that help?” I was like, “Yeah!” So I sent my stuff in to her, they called me in for a meeting, and the meeting went well. I was freelancing with Paradigm and SEM&M. I went on tons of commercial auditions. I would guess that I went on somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred auditions before I booked a commercial. Then, once I got one, I went bang-bang-bang and got like three in a week or two weeks.
When you’re freelancing, you have to make it clear, “Oh, Paradigm called me for that already,” or if Paradigm called me for a Miller Lite, I’d have to say, “Oh, SEM&M already cleared me for that, so go through them for that.” I really liked both of them and eventually I had to make a decision on one and I decided Paradigm “got me” more. I’m still with Paradigm commercially. I’ve always tried to get with them across-the-board. They’ve got a great legit department. The closest it got was, they looked at my reel, they all loved it, but this one person didn’t like it, so they’ve never wanted to run with me, on legit.
What was your first paid gig?
That was way down the road. My first paid gig would’ve been a commercial for Bugles Corn Snacks. I had no SAG card, but I had been on tons of auditions and they had always said, “If you get the commercial, you’ll get your SAG card.” So I did it, and that’s how I got my SAG card. It was a commercial with Mark Martin, NASCAR driver, and I was dressed up in the whole getup. I was supposed to be in his pit crew and I hand off this snack and it was like slow-motion. C’mon, a monkey could’ve done it! Right after that, I got CVS Pharmacy, which was a nice commercial where I was doing all the talking as a young father, going to get diapers. It was shot up in Boston. It was so nice to all of a sudden be flown up to Boston, put up in a nice hotel, all that. Then I had a Head & Shoulders.
I was doing black box theatre all throughout that. I was doing theatre at the Terry Schreiber Studio, which is where I studied. I did a great play there, Loose Ends. I love that play. I got to meet Michael Weller in the rehearsal process. That was great. I’ve done a lot of terrible stuff too, of course. I did a couple of student films and a couple of them, they actually finished the films and I had clips for my reel.
My first paid network TV job was The $treet with Tom Everett Scott. At the time, I was with a smaller agency and I would never get the whole script. I would never know what I was going in for. And I went into see Jen McNamara and Cami Hickman, thinking I was going in for an independent film, since I only had this one scene. I had no nerves. It was a party scene. I did the audition and the agent called and said, “Oh, you got The $treet.” I was like, “Oh, cool,” with no idea what it was. They said, “It’s a TV show. You’re going to have a read-thru in Jersey City. Meet the van on the Upper West Side, Fifty-sixth and Broadway.” And I said, “Okay.” I see two vans, I get in a van, there’s a couple of other actors in the van, I don’t recognize any of them, but everybody seems to know what’s going on. Not me. All of a sudden, I see—crossing the street—Adam Goldberg and I’m like, “I know that dude.” I see Tom and I’m like, “I know him too.” They’re getting in the other van and now I’m trying to play it cool. Everybody in the van is from LA and they’re all talking and I have no fucking clue what is going on. We go to some conference room and Darren Star is there. I don’t really know who Darren Star is except that, at the time, my agent had told me he did Beverly Hills, 90210, which I have to say I’d never watched. So, we do a table read and I still don’t really know what we’re doing. They say it’s a pilot. I don’t know if I really knew exactly what a pilot was. But it was a cool job. That was my first TV gig and that was way into my career, really. I had been doing this for a while. That was after three years of being in the City.
What do you consider your first break?
I don’t think there is the break. I think there’s a break. The movie The North End was a huge break for me. I got it through Back Stage. It was nonunion when I went in for it. I was essentially playing the alter-ego of the director—Frank Ciota—and his brother Joseph was the writer. I was kind of playing them. We hit it off. It was a love triangle between my character, my roommate, and a girl. It was done in the North End of Boston and they couldn’t find anybody to play my roommate. One of my friends, Mark Hartmann, who was in that first scene study class with me, told me he had gone in for it. He told me he had a good audition but that he hadn’t heard. I called the director and said, “Look, my friend Mark came in for you.” He was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We remember him. Yeah. He was good.” I said, “You should cast him. I know him already, we’re going to have the relationship.” And they needed a guy who was going to be big enough to be a beefy football player. I was playing an ex-quarterback who was now a documentary filmmaker and he was playing like an ex-lineman who was an investment banker now. They cast him. So, we got to go up to Boston together and we had a blast. We drove up there.
Frank had been a PA on Casino and had gotten the script to Frank Vincent who was in Raging Bull and Goodfellas and all of Scorsese’s movies. He got him the script and he ended up signing on to be the don of North End, who takes me under his wing. He got his friend Tony Darrow, who was in all the Woody Allen movies, to sign on. Now the movie became a SAG Low Budget film. We did the movie, I was the lead in it, it was great. We shot two weeks of it, they put a trailer together to raise money, then we went up and shot the rest of it for a month. It was a great experience. It went to all of these festivals, so Mark and I drove up to Montreal for the Montreal Film Festival. We went to the Boston Film Festival. It ended up playing in a Boston theatre in Revere and it was on for seven weeks and sold out. It was great. We kind of got exposure. They had us signing posters for this line of people. I was just laughing because I was thinking, “Little do they know, they could come into Turtle Bay tomorrow and make me pour ’em a pint of Guinness.” It was just very funny. I realized the bullshit of all that celebrity stuff.
What are your thoughts about agency mailings?
I did a mailing to like two hundred people in the beginning. I was very lucky. I had good shots. I had heard about doing mailings from being in a class. In a class, you’re in with people who are all in the same boat as you. I actually teach a class now and I always tell people: “Get into class! You guys get so much information from each other. You gotta eat, sleep, and drink this stuff.” So, I did a mailing after I went through a big process choosing a photographer. I had wasted money on my first headshots in Boston, thinking I didn’t have work to do to find out what good headshots look like. So, this time I had great headshots and out of two hundred pictures going out, I got like seven responses, which is really good—and I didn’t have very much on my resume.
How do you choose the material you work on?
I don’t turn down a lot of work. I’m not really in the position to be turning down a lot of work. But there are some things that I’m like, “No.” There’s a sense of empowerment in realizing, “I don’t have to do this. I can choose what I do. It’s my career.” I’ve turned down things like offers to do something at the Long Wharf in order to come out to LA for pilot season. I struggled with it, but I wanted to make a little headway in the TV world. I’m glad that I did. I ended up getting a pilot.
What was it like going to LA for pilot season?
The first year, my wife and I sublet our apartment to somebody—we were only renting in New York at the time—and we sublet an apartment in West LA. We probably overstayed a little bit. We spent a lot of money. It was a tough year. I didn’t book anything. I thought I was close to a lot of stuff. I was coming off The Sopranos, my agents and manager wanted me to be out here, I had tons of auditions, tons of meetings. I just didn’t book anything. It was tough. The second year, I came out here and stayed with a friend of mine from BC. He’s a “suit” in the industry. He’s my friend, but he just so happens to be in the business. He has been nice enough to let me stay at his place in the extra bedroom. I stayed with him my third pilot season too. Now, I’m toying with the idea of moving out here.
What made you choose New York?
The two major things for me that were dilemmas in this career have been: “Do I go to grad school?” and “Do I go to LA?” I chose not to go to grad school because I started getting jobs and I was learning and in class anyway. I’m jealous of people who’ve been able to go to conservatory and kind of be in a bubble for three years, just really delving into plays. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for going out there and scrapping. That’s the path that I chose.
The LA thing, I always have my little catchphrase: “I’m going to make a name for myself in New York and if something brings me to LA, I’ll go.” That’s kind of happening. I’m not a name, but I feel like in New York, I did some things. The biggest thing that I did that was high exposure was The Sopranos. It was a nice enough gig that people recognized it and after that, my agent said, “You’ve got to go out to LA.” Meanwhile, I own a piece of a place in the Village called New Gate Bar and Grill that I have to plug. It’s a great bar atmosphere with pub food and an outdoor deck at 535 LaGuardia, just north of Bleecker.
What was it like going to producers on The Sopranos?
I had been to Georgianne Walken for tiny roles about four other times on The Sopranos and I never got anything. But I knew this was my role. I knew I was going to book it. Before I went to producers, she brought me in to work with me on it. She really pulled for me. She was awesome. I went in for producers, I felt good, and then I heard back that I was the number one choice but that they needed to see a couple more people they hadn’t seen yet. As soon as they said that, I started thinking, “I’m never going to get this!” I had to go back in to producers again. I looked on the sign-in sheet and the two other guys there were with like William Morris and some other big agency. I thought, “They’re bringing in the big guns now.” I remember sitting there before going in, really stressed. David Chase came by, smacked me on the shoulder, and was like, “Cheer up!” I went in, I felt good in the audition, I left it on the floor, and thought, “I did my stuff. It’s either going to happen or it’s not.”
I left, went into a deli, had an egg sandwich, was reading the paper, my phone wasn’t working inside, so I came out and had a voicemail. I was going to get my wife Deirdre a Christmas gift and I got the voicemail as I was walking down the street: “Hey, Matt. It’s Georgianne Walken. Just want to thank you for coming in and to let you know…” and I was like, “Fuck!” She had such a down voice. And then she said, “You got the part, kiddo! Congratulations!” I was dancing on the street! I went into Barneys to get a perfume for Deirdre. There was like a little one and a big one and I said, “Y’know, I’ll take the big one! I’m doing The Sopranos!” I had to go that afternoon for a table read on the episode, so all of a sudden, I’m sitting there with the entire cast, reading, and it was really frickin’ cool. I got Georgianne flowers, brought ’em by the office. And it was a great job. They treated me like one of the group. They were very, very respectful. And it was a break, for sure. I’m in for much different projects now than I was before then.
Do you ever feel like giving up?
I don’t think I’ve ever seriously thought about giving up. I remember the first time I ever had any real concern. It was my twenty-eighth birthday. I have a lot of friends—and my brother and his friends—that are all in the finance world and they all do very well. I’m “the actor guy” out of the group. Most of my friends that I hang out with are not actors, although I do have my actor friends. I was bartending at Turtle Bay and things just weren’t clicking. People care about the things they can tell their friends about. I did some really good plays that a handful of people saw. But people don’t care about that. I would have friends come in while I was bartending and say, “Dude, this is my friend who’s on the Head & Shoulders commercial.” I’m pouring my buddies a beer and going, “What am I doing? I’m twenty-eight years old. Am I really making any headway or am I just kidding myself?” That was the first time I checked that, but it never really lasted.
Now, during the commercial strike, I got certified to be a real estate salesperson in a five-day crash course. I’ve never used it, but that was a strike-related choice. I’m always open to other ideas about how I can be a businessman about this career. I realize that, if you don’t think that way, there’s the danger that you’ll get cynical about this business. If you can do things that bring in income that can kind of keep you afloat and a little more steady while doing this crazy up and down thing, you keep your positive attitude. You don’t get bitter. Having friends outside the business also helps with that. It’s a crazy business and it’s a shitty business, but if you get back to why you got into it in the first place, you can keep from growing bitter. If you’re not enjoying it anymore, don’t do it. There’s hundreds of things you could do that are probably easier, so really enjoy it if you’re going to do it.
What impact has acting had on your personal life?
I think the biggest challenge is financial. It’s just so up and down that you really have got to figure a way to make everything happen financially. It’s a career that never stops. You’re never really on vacation from being an actor, I don’t think. Romantic scenes are definitely a challenge because this is what we do, in this job. My wife Deirdre is not in the business, so it’s tough. We both just have to be open about what’s going on. That’s the best way to deal with it, I think. When I did The Sopranos, I had a scene where I had to do a shot of tequila and lick salt off of a stripper’s breast. I told Deirdre all about it and I warned her. We were engaged at this point. We watched the show together. It got to that scene and she said, “Oh. That’s it? Oh. That wasn’t that bad at all.” I’m thinking I’m totally in the clear. She was working—in ad sales at the time—in an office and guys in the office were talking about it the next day. They were all saying, “How could you let him do that? Do you know how many takes he probably had to do?” She told me this and I said, “Are you kidding me? These guys screwed me!” So, I told her that we did it in one take and actually it was my tongue double.
What advice would you give to an actor starting out?
Do your thing. Prepare. Have faith—whatever you want to call it. It’s going to happen or it’s not going to happen. You really can’t control it, so don’t bother trying. Embrace the chaos and try to enjoy it.
This interview was conducted on February 2, 2005, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.