"Cats," Drea de Matteo says. "Cats. That's when I knew I wanted to act."
And so a thank-you note to Andrew Lloyd Webber is in order, for making possible Adriana, the Mafia bride who was never meant to last beyond her first episode on The Sopranos. "I was 8 or maybe 10, sitting in the third row with my parents, and Rum Tum Tugger took me on stage and made me dance with him and sing," she says, then begins to sing, "'The Rum Tum Tugger is a curious cat... ' I was petrified but I didn't want to get back down. I liked it there."
"That was the moment?" I ask.
"That was the moment," she says.
"But isn't Rum Tum Tugger scary up close?"
"Nuts," she says. "But not as crazy as Mr. Mistoffelees."
"The magical Mr. Mistoffelees?"
"Yeah," she says.
ANGELINAS IN AMERICA
The admission is strange, considering Drea de Matteo's reputation as a wild child, a rock chick. The first round of media stories about her were so taken with her past that the results were little more than strings of sensational life details. A feature in a British style magazine dutifully recorded the angel dust she smoked when she was 12, her father's limousine shuttling her to Chippendales when she was 14, the stolen car, the AC/DC tattoo, the plans for the pet mausoleum, and the preserved dog testicles she keeps on a shelf beside her bed. The coverage burned, and so Drea, now 29, unguardedly explains that she's learning to be guarded.
"People prep you for these interviews and say that you don't need to be yourself," she pleads. "'Just don't be yourself.' And I don't know how to be any other way. I know how to act. I don't know how to do this shit."
Which is one of the reasons why Drea de Matteo is easy company. Her features, which appear angular and defiant in photographs and on television, are softer in person. She isn't on the star trip, which is a good thing, because clubs and restaurants are still slow to recognize that she's Adriana from "The Sopranos." The only reason she suggests that we relocate from her East Village apartment to Pastis, the meatpacking district bistro with the fashion party temperament (empty tables inside, empty tables outside, but nothing available; it's 4 p.m.), is to pursue a particular steak sandwich, which she orders with extra cheese.
When in conversation with Drea, it's natural to discuss Angelina Jolie, who resuscitated the Uncalculating Bad Girl. "I like her," Drea says. "She says what she wants to say, people write it, and then she gets a lot of heat for it. She's just being who she is; she's honest. There's such a curse about that."
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