Actor Vincent Curatola, who starred as Johnny ‘Sack’ Sacramoni in the classic HBO series The Sopranos, lamented the growth of “politically correct” attitudes in America, offering his remarks in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Marlow invited Curatola’s comment on the suffocation of creativity in the arts via “political correctness.”

“One of the things that’s so striking to me … is the political correctness age we’re in now, which is bigger than ever,” said Marlow. “Comedians have to watch what they say. You can’t even have a villain saying bad things, at this point. And so your characters, you guys ripped each other about your weight, about your noses, about your wife’s as. I mean, it was brutal, but it was also real and it was wildly entertaining. Your character wielded a cigarette like it was nobody’s business, and it’s one of those things where having a cigarette — smoking — is worse than being a murderer, at this point. Speak to that.”

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Vincent Curatola laughed in agreement with Marlow’s view, joking, “I smoke a cigar occasionally, now. If I pull out a cigar in public it’s like a pulled out a gun.”

“I’m glad you mentioned that, because my wife said something like that to me a couple of weeks ago. We were at the reunion in Manhattan as the School of Visual Arts Theater with David Chase. It was a panel discussion,” Curatola said. “She said to me, ‘You think they would put [the Sopranos] on the air today?’ And I said, ‘Who cares?’ I said, ‘It is what it is. That’s the lifestyle. These guys make jokes. They say this. They do that.'”

“Have we gotten to the point where we’re going to start banning books, now? Or we’re going to start to burn them in the town square, because something may be offensive? And I’ll tell you something else. Why in God’s name would any of those characters even think about wanting to be politically correct?” Curatola considered. “They say, ‘Hey, I make money. I say what I want to say when I say it and to whom I wish to say it.’ You know, there’s an arrogance there that you cannot cover up with touchy-feely writing.”

Breitbart News’s John Nolte praised The Sopranos on the 20th anniversary of its launch:

What Sopranos creator David Chase did accomplish, though, was nothing less than to crack the artistic code for a medium that was well into middle age. Chase hardened the mold of the ten to thirteen-episode format, and through adult storytelling, respect for the intelligence of his audience, cinema-quality production values, and pitch-perfect performances, showed the world what television was truly capable of. His mold is now the norm, what we expect. At the time, we had never seen anything like it, and therefore it is not hyperbole to argue The Sopranos is to television what Rock Around the Clock was to music.

The Many Saints of Newark — a prequel TV series of The Sopranos — is now in development. Michael Gandolfini — son of the late James Gandolfini, who depicted The Sopranos protagonist — has been cast to star in the forthcoming show.

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