In the original draft of the script, at the end when Tracee is dead out behind the Bada Bing, Tony Soprano comes out and says something about how it’s going to ruin another rug to wrap her bloody body up in it. He is totally careless about her death. I loved that.
It showed what I already knew about my worth as a young attractive woman in the eyes of many men – I was an object to be used and thrown away. Even at 19 having grown up in a pretty safe Vermont environment, I still knew what Tracee was going through, I had already experienced it, scaled in a lesser way.
I wanted to play Tracee so innocently – like she didn’t even know the world she was in – like she thought she was a Disney Princess. I wanted the audience to truly feel her innocence, so they would also feel stunned when she was so easily killed, and shaken by how they had previously admired these gangster characters.
When James Gandolfini read the part with me, he put in a request to change the ending of the episode. Instead of responding to Tracee’s death by being angry about the destroyed carpet, he changed it to say, remorsefully, “20 years old, this girl.” I thought it was kind of lame for him to change it, but probably professionally a smart move. He had an instinct about how harsh it was and how audiences might respond.