Paulie Walnuts’ Real-life Brother Keeps an Eye on His Mouth

c. 2007 Religion News Service KALAMAZOO, Mich. _ Not many people make Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri of HBO’s “The Sopranos” watch his mouth. But there’s a priest here who gives it a try. Paulie Walnuts, the fiercely loyal, silver-haired tough guy from the hit TV show, is played by Tony Sirico. His little brother is the […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

KALAMAZOO, Mich. _ Not many people make Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri of HBO’s “The Sopranos” watch his mouth.

But there’s a priest here who gives it a try.


Paulie Walnuts, the fiercely loyal, silver-haired tough guy from the hit TV show, is played by Tony Sirico. His little brother is the Rev. Robert Sirico of St. Mary Church in Kalamazoo.

When the brothers talk on the phone or get together at family gatherings, it’s the priest who reminds the TV hitman to mind his lip.

Tony Sirico said he does his best, but sometimes there’s just too much Paulie in Tony.

“If you’ve played Paulie Walnuts enough, you’d understand,” Tony Sirico said in a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn, as the show prepared for its final episode on Sunday (June 10). “If Paulie can’t curse, he can’t talk.”

For Father Sirico, that means the little brother in a strong Italian family is giving orders to his big brother, a situation where even the influence of the white cleric’s collar has its bounds.

“In an Italian family, yeah, are you kidding? I get no respect,” Father Sirico said.

Like Paulie Walnuts, Tony Sirico is loyal.

“Blood is thicker than whatever,” he said. “Family comes first.”

But back when Tony and Robert Sirico were growing up in Brooklyn as sons of candy store owners, they didn’t have a close relationship, Robert said. Tony was the oldest of four siblings, and Robert was the baby, nine years younger than Tony.

By the time Robert was walking, his two brothers “were on the street,” he said. It was almost as if he was an only child. His older sister Carol was like a second mother, he said.


Early on, Robert developed very different interests from his brothers.

“In terms of the kind of culture and roughness, I was interested in books and religion. They were interested in playing pool,” Robert Sirico said of Tony and his other brother, Carmine.

Robert went on to attend the University of Southern California, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Italian in the early ’80s.

Although he was a leftist political activist during his time at USC, Robert later reverted to his more conservative upbringing and entered the seminary.

In 1989, he celebrated his first Mass, at a Brooklyn church. Tony attended, but did not receive Communion. Tony told his brother it was because he had not gone to confession. “I respected that when he did that,” Robert said.

The next year, Tony took the part of mobster Tony Stacks in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning mob film “Goodfellas.”

Robert moved to Kalamazoo nine years ago. A year later, his brother became Paulie Walnuts.


Although they’ve achieved success in very different fields, both brothers are complimentary of each other.

Tony boasted that his little brother is “well received” at the Vatican. “He’s a well-rounded man. Worldly. He’s very intelligent,” Tony said.

Robert said of his brother’s sneering, no-nonsense characters: “What you see on television is pretty close to the real thing. We’re happy he’s made it big. I don’t anticipate he’ll be doing Shakespeare anytime soon, but he found this niche as this tough-guy character. You can’t help but be proud of that achievement.”

When summing up their different paths, Tony mentioned a speech he gave at Robert’s ordination. Tony had a room full of priests laughing when he compared his relationship with his brother to that of Rocky Sullivan (played by James Cagney) and Jerry Connelly (played by Pat O’Brien) in the 1938 film “Angels With Dirty Faces.”

The movie is about two kids growing up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Rocky is caught by the cops, sent to reform school and turns to a life of crime. Jerry, the faster runner of the two, is able to flee the police and later becomes a priest.

“He could run a little faster than me,” Tony Sirico said. “He was always a little faster in other ways.”


(John Liberty writes for the Kalamazoo Gazette in Kalamazoo, Mich.)

KRE/CM END LIBERTYPhotos of Sirico and `Paulie Walnuts’ available via https://religionnews.com

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