Michael Gandolfini Has the Best Excuse for the Nepo Baby Discourse: Dead Parent Club Members Don’t Count
The “nepo baby” label has plagued Hollywood for years at this point, as the world debates the merits and potential stardom of the newest crop of second-generation actors. Even though the trend of multiple generations of actor families have been around since… basically the dawn of Hollywood, the modern discourse surrounding it has been something else.
As it turns out, one of the actors caught in the fray of that conversation has a pretty hilarious outlook on it all. Michael Gandolfini, star of Daredevil: Born Again and the son of late The Sopranos star James Gandolfini, recently explained it during an appearance on Gianmarco Soresi’s podcast The Downside. Gandolfini revealed a “bit” that he has with Cooper Hoffman, the son of fellow late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, where they argue that having a dead parent counteracts the “nepo baby” label.
“Me and Cooper Hoffman have this bit where we’re like, ‘Yeah, we gotta get rid of those nepo babies,’” Gandolfini explained. “And then whenever someone says, like, ‘Aren’t you guys though?’, it’s like, ‘If one of your parents is dead, it’s fine.”
As Gandolfini revealed in the same interview, he and Hoffman actually became friends after being mistaken for each other in public. As he put it: “If someone’s not calling me my dad’s name, they’re calling me Cooper Hoffman, and they’re like, ‘I loved you in Licorice Pizza.’ So we had just been hearing about each other so much, and we met at a party, and he came over, and I grabbed his face, and we hugged, and we’ve been like two peas in a pod.”
Gandolfini’s comments about his and Hoffman’s dead dads almost immediately went viral. Some have argued that Gandolfini’s joke is bleak… but at the same time, they’ve been met with a lot of charmed responses. Not just among the members of the unofficial “Dead Dad Club”, which has become an Internet shorthand for someone who lost their father, but among fans of the careers of both Gandolifinis and Hoffmans, a pool that has only continued to grow as both sons have shown off their acting chops in various projects.
The “Dead Dad Club”…
One response from user @akeltheartist even feels uniquely vindicated, after they tweeted in 2025 that “Nepotism doesn’t count if it’s the child of a beloved actor who died too young and it makes me emotional that their kid sometimes reminds me of them when they’re acting.”
In Gandolfini’s offense, the joke does arguably have some actual truth to it. Compared to the protypical “nepo baby” whose talents are constantly questioned in relation to their already-famous parents (especially if there’s any insinuation that the parents’ fame led to the child’s career), both Gandolfini and Hoffman had their first significant onscreen credits years after their dads passed. Outside of a role as “kid on the ride” in his dad’s 2011 thriller Down the Shore, Michael’s first onscreen credit wasn’t until 2018, a while after James had died in 2013. The same can be said for Cooper Hoffman, whose first onscreen credit wasn’t until 2021’s Licorice Pizza, nearly seven years after Philip’s passing in 2014.
Either way, Gandolfini and Hoffman have shown the potential to have fascinating careers, and the fact that they can make light of their tragic situation together might be a great way to navigate that.
(featured image: Disney+)
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