Robert Patrick is setting the record straight.
The “Tulsa King” star, who portrayed Davey Scatino in “The Sopranos,” has responded to theories that his character killed James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano after the screen cut to black in the iconic series finale of David Chase’s hit HBO crime drama.
“I think that was interesting. Did that really get a lot of traction?” Patrick, 67, asked TV Insider regarding the online theories. “David Chase is the only one who knows. I was never contacted about it. I don’t know.”
However, the “Terminator 2” star wouldn’t rule the possibility out.
“Was there a guy that might have looked like me, or people thought that it was me? It’s interesting,” Patrick continued. “Yeah, I wonder. I don’t know.”
“I feel blessed that people would really still be thinking about my character at the end,” he added. “But boy, what a great experience.”
Patrick joined “The Sopranos” during its second season in 2000. His character was Tony’s childhood friend, and he reconnected with the mob boss through a high-stakes poker game.
A compulsive gambler, Davey ignored Tony’s warnings and racked up massive debt. He was quietly destroyed in a mob “bust-out” and lost his sporting goods business and family over the course of three episodes before fleeing New Jersey for Nevada.
But some “Sopranos” fans think that Patrick’s character may have returned to get his revenge and kill Tony during the show’s ambiguous final episode in 2007.
Although the screen famously cuts to black as Tony sits with his wife, Carmela, and son, A.J., at Holsten’s diner, eagle-eyed viewers believe that a man who looks like Davey Scatino enters the diner to kill Tony.
While Chase has described the final moment of “The Sopranos” as Tony’s “death scene,” it was not always how he planned to end the six-season story.
“The scene I had in my mind was not that scene. Nor did I think of cutting to black,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “I had a scene in which Tony comes back from a meeting in New York in his car.”
“At the beginning of every show, he came from New York into New Jersey, and the last scene could be him coming from New Jersey back into New York for a meeting at which he was going to be killed,” the director revealed.
As for Patrick, who currently stars in “Tulsa King” alongside Sylvester Stallone, he acknowledged that there are many similarities between the Paramount+ crime drama and “The Sopranos.”
“The fans are there,” he told TV Insider. “That’s a throughline there for sure.”
Patrick also revealed that he paid tribute to Gandolfini, who died from a sudden heart attack at the age of 51 in June 2013, in a scene from Season 3 of “Tulsa King.”
“That’s why I threw out that line, ‘How’s your balls, Manfredi?’” the “Peacemaker” star shared. “That came from Jimmy Gandolfini. That’s what Jimmy came in and said to me right before we shot that scene where he beats me up in my office to collect.”
“Jimmy came up to me and said to me, as Jimmy to Robert Patrick, ‘How’s your balls?’” he continued. “So I threw that out there to Stallone, he loved it: ‘How’s your balls, Manfredi?’”
