“What you think? I’m still the kid on the school bus,” Tony asks Davey before everything comes tumbling down. We don’t have to be told. This is not a new problem. Tony had Davey pegged from the time he landed at his school. The army brat who’d lived all over never learns his lesson. He makes bets he can’t cover and plays until he’s empty. Even Artie Bucco knows not to lend Stacino $20k for some “breathing room.” Artie says he has to pay for a new roof for his restaurant, but it’s because he already knows everything is going to fall on his friend’s head, and he’d never get his money back.
First Davey tells Tony’s collection guy he has a dentist’s appointment, forcing the boss himself to make a house call. Then Davey tries to leverage how their kids are so close, go to the same school, and how he pegged a guy in the head on some trip. As a show of goodwill, he offers up his son Eric’s SUV as a down-payment. Tony accepts and gives it to Meadow, who has driven in it enough to know where it came from. Carmela gives Tony agita over it because Davey’s brother-in-law is close to the provost at Georgetown, and she might have to make more ricotta pies for Meadow’s college.
“This kid’s father, he’s a fuckin degenerate gambler, but he’s also a respected businessman in the community and everything that goes along with that,” Tony tells his therapist, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). “So, it becomes my fault that he lost his kid’s car? I gotta look after him because he’s a sick bastard?”
Davey’s arc starts in Season 2, Episode 6, “The Happy Wanderer,” when we meet him and his son, Eric, while they are checking out colleges. He also appears in “Bust Out” and “Funhouse.” Patrick “met David Chase for a film a couple of years prior to him coming up with the idea, or at least selling the idea, of The Sopranos,” he told Movieweb. “Then he sent me the script for “The Happy Wanderer” and said, ‘I see you in this role. It’s against type, you’ll never be cast this way, but I think it’s a brilliant idea.’”
While the character Davey is only vaguely familiar with the concept of luck, the actor was on a roll. The unfortunate gambler role came while Patrick was preparing to work on All the Pretty Horses, and director Billy Bob Thornton “asked me to go on a starvation diet, really lose some weight and try to look deathly for this character,” he told Movieweb. “David didn’t know that I was that light and that vulnerable. But anyway, it just worked.”
This is where the acting genius of Robert Patrick is most evident. He knows playing the victim on a show about villains makes him the antagonist, and he started early. While speaking on the podcast “Talking Sopranos,” Patrick told Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa that he started needling the star of the show from the moment they met.
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