When Robert Iler was 12 years old, he shot the pilot for a show that would become one of the most acclaimed series of all time. Iler played Tony Soprano's (James Gadolfini) son A.J. on The Sopranos from 1999 to 2007, meaning he spent all of his teen years on the influential HBO show. But, even though The Sopranos was a major success and is still loved by many fans, Iler took a different path in life after it concluded instead of continuing with acting. He's also never seen most of the series he acted in, even though he is planning to watch the new prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark.
After going through some hard times during the show's run and after it ended, Iler seems to be doing well now with a relationship, a move away from acting, and a podcast with one of his former co-stars. Read on to find out more about Iler and why he walked away from the entertainment industry.
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When The Sopranos ended in 2007, Iler decided to quit acting—at least as much as he could. "I told my manager I wanted six months off to go play poker and hang out with my friends and just do whatever," the 36-year-old said on the Talking Sopranos podcast, hosted by his former co-stars Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, in May 2020. "And he kept calling: 'It's been a year.' 'It's been two years.' The only thing I have done since Sopranos was when I got a call to do jury duty and I didn't want to do jury duty … Twice, to get out of jury duty, I did an episode of Law & Order." While The Sopranos was still running, however, he did take on a couple of other roles, including one in the movie Daredevil.
While Iler hasn't acted for years, he's not completely against the idea of trying it out again. "There are times when I think, no, never. And then there's the times where—like, last week when in this quarantine, where I was watching Ozark," he said. "It blew me away … There's time where I'm sitting at home watching that and I'm like, I could see doing something like this, and I would really enjoy it."
He added of The Sopranos, "For me, I was extremely spoiled with my first thing … There is a part of me that's like, if you do something else, it will mess it up."
Iler began making money playing poker following The Sopranos, but has since stop playing as much. "You go play poker and there are no rules," he told the site US Poker. "You can come whenever you want, sit wherever you want, play whatever game you want, and leave whenever you want. Since I'd been acting since I was six years old, I think that's what was so attractive to me about poker."
But, he realized his life was also filled with partying, gambling, and drugs, and that he needed to make a change. Iler got sober in 2013. "I haven't been drunk in over seven years … and hardcore drugs is also seven years," he said on Talking Sopranos. "But I was taking Xanax every day, so it took to me a long time to get off of Xanax, and I had to go see a specialist, so that's probably been five years."
Iler now hosts a podcast, Pajama Pants, with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played A.J.'s sister Meadow Soprano. Their third co-host is YouTuber Kassem G. The podcast is wide-ranging and is about their lives and anything else they want to discuss. An upcoming episode will focus on the new Sopranos movie, and Imperioli will appear as a guest after Sigler and Iler have seen the film. "We're gonna be clueless," Iler told Page Six. "Michael is going to come on and explain to us everything we don't understand."
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There are a few reasons that Iler hasn't watched the entirety of The Sopranos. "I've probably not seen 80% of the episodes," he said on Talking Sopranos, explaining that he's seen at least the first episode of every season and sometimes the first two episodes.
Initially, he didn't want to watch simply because it was "uncomfortable" to see himself act. But, following Gandolfini's 2013 death, it's particularly hard to see his TV dad onscreen. "To watch 80 hours of videos about Jim, it would feel like torture," he added.
Iler also told Page Six that when he was a teenager, he just followed suit when it came to the other actors' thoughts about watching themselves. "I grew up on that set and it was very anti-Hollywood," he said. "It wasn't like, 'We want Insta followers' and all this. [It was more like], 'We don't want to look—we don't want to see ourselves!' I fell in line with everyone else."
During an interview on the podcast Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend in June 2021, Iler said that he is in a relationship—"I met somebody and its been good"—but that he was on a dating app before that. And, it turns out, not everyone on the app believed he was really who he said he was. "I've also had people write on there, 'You're such a loser! You're using A.J. from The Sopranos' pictures,'" he said. "Like, people who will think it's not me. Girls have gotten really angry."
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