One doesn’t expect to ask Edie Falco, the esteemed Emmy-winning actress who played Carmela in The Sopranos and the titular character in Nurse Jackie, about her experience with a boy accidentally ejaculating onto her chest. But she is currently starring in a TV show created by and starring Pete Davidson. So now this just isn’t a relevant topic of conversation, it is the first thing that demands to be talked about.
So, Edie Falco, we ask: Is Bupkis the first time you’ve played a character who is introduced on screen while someone is shooting cum onto your chest?
“Strangely enough, no,” she says, then laughing and winking at the camera when we talk over Zoom. “Yes, of course it is. And in fact, my agents almost didn’t show me the script. They were like, ‘You know, you’re never going to do this…’ So I was like, ‘Oh, send it over.’ They were wrong!”
In Bupkis, which is now available to stream on Peacock, Falco plays the mother of Davidson’s Pete. The series is semi-autobiographical, jumping back and forth in time from Pete’s teenage years growing up in Staten Island, raised by his mother after his firefighter father dies on 9/11, and modern day, as the two navigate their changing dynamic as Pete’s celebrity grows.
The series, then, vacillates between silly, outrageous comedy—a mother in the firing range of her son’s orgasm after walking in on him masturbating—to the surprisingly profound, as a family grapples with grief and resilience. Our conversation with Falco unfolds in similar fashion. Yes, she reveals that she was aware of Davidson’s reputation for having “BDE” (Big Dick Energy), and has a healthy laugh about that. But she also opens up about her experience being in New York City on 9/11 and acting with Davidson in scenes specifically about his loss.
Davidson has been open about how close he is to mother, talking about how they still lived together while he was on Saturday Night Live during segments on the show. In Bupkis, you see the foundation for that bond. There’s a riotous sequence in which Pete’s mother agrees to go on a stakeout with him, barely flinching at how bizarre it would be to hide in a car outside a stranger’s house before agreeing to the hijinks. They are a mother and son who share an unspoken intimacy, and it’s something that Falco, who has two children, says she knows well.
Covering everything from “BDE” to her opinion on Staten Island and the unexpected emotion of Bupkis, here’s our conversation.
After your agents didn’t want to show you the script for Bupkis because of that opening scene, what convinced you to join the show?
Well, first of all, I’m the mother of a son. It is a very specific type of relationship. My son is 18. He’s not as grown as Pete is, but it’s a dynamic I understand and that I am living as we speak. And Pete, he’s adorable. You know? He’s very endearing and sweet and humble, and was massively excited about the making of this show. It was contagious.
He’s a celebrity with a robust presence in gossip pages and tabloids. How much of that were you aware of before signing onto this?
Well, that was all I was aware of. I didn’t know much about anything else he did. I knew he was on SNL, but that long ago became way too late for me to stay up to watch. So I had not seen anything he’d done, you know? All I knew was “he’s dating this person,” or whatever. I don't know what else I knew about aside from his dating history, so I really didn't know what to expect. I knew he was part of the present-day zeitgeist—a name that came up a lot. My kids knew who he was.
Had you heard about the “BDE” reputation that has followed him around?
Indeed. When I started doing the show, I started hearing more of this stuff. I started wondering, like, maybe I should find out what all this stuff means. I have my sources. I found out.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about him is how open he’s been about how close he is to his mother. What did that mean to you when you were doing this role?
I didn’t know he's spoken a lot about how close he is with his mother, but that doesn’t surprise me. They went through a very big family trauma together. And there she was, young and having to raise these two kids by herself—not something she had planned on. And you get close to your kids. You have to hold each other through difficult times and boost each other up. And it makes perfect sense that they had gotten so close during this time. I’m a single mom and I am also very close to my son. So it was something I could slip into very easily.
I was really struck by the episode where she goes on the stakeout with him—just by how willing she is to go along with everything. I think it speaks to how much she understands him, even given how crazy his life had become with his celebrity status.
That was something I picked up on throughout the writing, that she just knows her kid. I do think she’s certainly concerned about him and worried about some of the things that are more difficult. But she also realizes that he is his own entity now, and she may have to stand back and just let him be him. And hopefully catch him if he falls. “I’m here if he ever needs me.” But he’s also growing into a man. That’s a kettle of fish that I do not know, managing his celebrity, and the whole social media presence—and all that stuff. Being the mother of that person, knowing that you could read anything about him, if you Google the right thing.
You’ve been a part of several gigantic TV shows in your career. I’m curious how you feel about a person through their relationship to fame and celebrity through a series like this, the way that Pete is doing with Bupkis. He’s not just experiencing the spotlight, he’s working through it through art in a very public manner—with a whole TV show about it.
It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about that. It’s such a good question, because people who aim for this, like, “I want to go to move to Hollywood and become rich and famous,” have no idea, really, what that actually entails. I’ve hung out with some massively rich and famous people, and they are truly not the happiest of the people that I spend time with. So it is something to navigate, especially if you don’t come from a family of rich and famous people. You’re blazing your own trail.
My father said to me once—he was a guy from Brooklyn. Somebody recognized me on the street and my father just said, “I have no advice for you.” He said, “I can’t imagine. I don’t know anything about what your life must be like now.” It was sort of wistful, the way he said it, but he was also deeply proud of me. The truth is, if you don’t come from that, you’re really just all the time thinking, like, “What do I do with this?”
The world of celebrity today is certainly different from when you were doing The Sopranos. But I am curious after working on this show with Pete, if you do think this is a healthy way of working through things like his relationship to fame.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. It certainly is a unique [way of doing it]. I don’t know many other people who would do that. I did, at times, worry about him revealing as much as he felt comfortable revealing. But I’m not him. It might actually be the best possible thing for him to do. I really don’t know. Very quickly, I fell into a maternal place with him and was worried and wanted to make sure that he’s OK. But he has a real mom and a really good one.
Now that you’ve done this show with him, what do you think is the massive appeal of Pete Davidson to so many people?
He has a magnetic personality. The kid is as alive as a person as I’ve ever seen. I imagine he must sleep, though I personally have never seen it. He just has an energy that is contagious. And, again, he had an excitement about the making of this show that really—I don’t know—was sweet. And he’s adorable and he’s self-deprecating and humble. He has a lot of very attractive qualities and it pulls people in. I mean, he got all kinds of people to be on this thing.
A lot of New Yorkers have strong opinions about Staten Island. What was yours before the show? Did it change after filming?
I didn’t have much of a relationship, personally, with Staten Island. I’ve certainly heard all the jokes. It is the butt of jokes. That’s kind of where I came at it from. But once you get out there, you realize, like, real people live there. And they’re living their lives just like everybody else does. It just somehow got this reputation that perhaps it doesn’t deserve. The truth is we didn’t shoot a ton of stuff in Staten Island. We shot a couple of things, like the exterior of some homes and stuff like that. But I can’t say I’m thoroughly knowledgeable of the borough, at this point, but it seems like a perfectly nice place.
The story of what happened to Pete’s father on 9/11 is a very public anecdote. What did it feel like, then, to be acting out those scenes with Pete, where your characters discuss his father’s death?
I had incredible sympathy for him and his whole family. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. And I, too, was here in the city on the day that that happened, and I have my own relationship with that event. And It’s a huge one. It’s a huge one in the lives of all New Yorkers. For all Americans. For all people.
It was really, like, with kid gloves that I wanted to handle all of that stuff, because it was really serious. And the only thing that made it easier to do was the fact that Pete was pretty easygoing about it. He wasn’t being precious about it. He had spoken of it, and it was part of what he wanted to portray in this show. So that made it a little bit easier to perform that stuff. But from a personal standpoint, it was a very big deal. His whole family had to manage that event. Many thousands of families had to manage that event, but this is the closest I ever got to someone who dealt with it firsthand.
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