Drea de Matteo’s phone is blowing up. “There’s a lot fucking going on over here,” the 52-year-old actress says when she picks up the call from Rolling Stone. “It’s like I have a fucking sex tape out there or something. Just kidding.”
The bustling activity, at least, is no exaggeration: though most recognizable as the feisty, sultry, doomed Adriana La Cerva from The Sopranos, de Matteo now runs a viral OnlyFans account, manages a streetwear brand called ULTRAFREE (she co-founded it with her partner, Robby Staebler, drummer for the rock band All Them Witches), and is currently in conversations about starting a podcast. “Actually, when I get off the phone with you, I’m supposed to call Robert [Iler],” she says — the actor who played AJ Soprano and currently hosts the podcast Not Today, Pal with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who portrayed his on-screen sibling Meadow. “I can’t really talk about it yet,” de Matteo says of the potential project.
If she’s thinking carefully about her next moves, it could be because the road to this moment hasn’t been easy, as de Matteo freely acknowledges. After The Sopranos, she became a regular on shows including Joey, Desperate Housewives, and Sons of Anarchy while landing the occasional guest TV appearance and roles in smaller films. By the time the landmark mob series had been off the air for more than a decade, a Sopranos revival was in full swing, powered by HBO‘s streaming app and devoted meme accounts.
In theory, it was a moment for de Matteo to capitalize on her most iconic performance. But SopranosCon, a 2019 New Jersey fan convention that rode the wave of nostalgia, was an “intense” experience for de Matteo, who had to delay her appearance by a day because her children were sick and wound up doing a marathon meet-and-greet.
“I stayed there and I signed until everyone got their autograph,” she says. “I never got up, I never had lunch, and then the [organizers] actually had the nerve to tell me that I cost them money by signing for too long. So I was actually really angry at those guys, and I would never do business with them again.” De Matteo claims, in fact, that despite the “great setup” and “delicious mozzarella” at the event, the SopranosCon team “really took advantage” of certain actors who participated. “A lot of us were improperly paid,” she says. (Michael Mota, creator of the convention and CEO of VirtualCons, calls de Matteo’s account “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” claims she was paid “handsomely” in cash for her appearance, including for the day she missed, and disputes the notion that any cast member was unfairly compensated, noting that several went on to work with him at other events.)
In 2020, the pandemic almost entirely shut down the entertainment business. Podcasts were an exception. De Matteo and her friend Chris Kushner launched Made Women, a Sopranos rewatch series that ended, de Matteo claims, because producers Cavalry Media stopped paying her and Kushner. (The CEO of the company, which has since experienced a string of financial and legal woes, including a breach-of-contract suit from an exited co-founder, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.) Then came the independently produced Gangster Goddess, more of a freewheeling talk show with interviews of Sopranos friends, which proved too much work for de Matteo and Kushner — though they currently sell a wine by the same name.
But the roughest time in recent memory came with the advent of the Covid-19 vaccine, which de Matteo has declined to receive. The decision meant she was ineligible for the acting gigs that became available as pandemic restrictions eased, since Hollywood sets widely mandated vaccination. De Matteo stayed quiet about the vaccine even as her resistance to it created an economic hardship. It was only when people started asking why she launched an OnlyFans in August, charging $15 a month for playful photos of herself in skimpy lingerie, that she revealed how being unvaccinated had cut off her usual source of income. All at once, then, she was an adult content creator and a voice in the anti-vaxxer movement.
“I couldn’t work in my own industry anymore,” she says. “There were jobs coming in after the lockdown, and then the vaccine mandates came. I’m just an old hippie, man. It just wasn’t for me.” She takes the line that refusing the jab is consistent with her liberal stance on abortion. “I’ve always been pro-choice in my life,” she says. “Why are we not pro-choice right now?” De Matteo adds, “It can’t just be, ‘You guys are hurting the American people because your president said it.’ He doesn’t even make sense anymore.”
Matteo doesn’t explicitly argue that the vaccines are unsafe — she maintains that she “researched it to death” and decided “there was just not enough knowledge” on the effects — but she does share approving comments about prominent anti-vax activists including presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tech millionaire Steve Kirsch, and Sherri Tenpenny, all notorious for spreading misinformation on the subject. (Trained as an osteopathic physician, Tenpenny had her medical license suspended by the State Medical Board of Ohio last year after she didn’t participate in an investigation into comments she made about the vaccine.) “I didn’t know that it was gonna open up this huge can of worms, but it is still really controversial, I guess,” de Matteo says. “If anybody knows anything about me right now, it’s that I’m probably not going to shut up at this point.”
Meanwhile, she’s raked in tens of thousands on OnlyFans. A recent promotion for new subscribers, offering exclusive “intimate content” made with high-profile collaborators on the platform (model and actress Carmen Electra as well as Married to the Mob fashion designer Leah McSweeney of The Real Housewives of New York City) has alone racked up almost $35,000 in tips. De Matteo says her success in the space was a surprise given that the whole thing started from an unserious premise.
“The kids started joking around about it, and they were like, ‘Hey, why don’t you do this like as a joke?’” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘All right, well, let’s do it.’ We were gonna do a podcast on OnlyFans, a really controversial podcast on there that we knew wasn’t gonna get banned for talking about touchy subjects. We thought, ‘Let’s put it behind the paywall, get a huge audience and do this here.’ And you know, maybe have someone rub my feet while we’re talking — so you make it OnlyFans friendly, you know what I mean?”
Instead, as de Matto discovered when she announced the page, there was huge demand for her photos from a public that views her as the ultimate avatar of the “Mob Wife” aesthetic. “People are really excited over granny porn,” she says with a laugh, and so she leaned into it, paying off the mortgage on her foreclosed home and other large debts in the process. “Now we’re out of the woods with our home, thank god, and now OnlyFans is completely funding ULTRAFREE,” de Matteo says. The clothing line advertises itself as “antibullshit” and includes garments with slogans like “Defund Satanism,” as well as graphics of skulls, lightning bolts, bats, and automatic rifles. “I like the stuff with the curse words on it,” she says when discussing her favorite designs so far, “because I have such a filthy mouth.” The sensibility, de Matteo says, is meant to be goofy. “We kind of make fun of all the stuff that’s happening in society — probably too much. Plus, aliens, conspiracy stuff, just for fun. We all need to get back to a place where we’re not so precious about everything and we’re not Gen Z-ing nonstop. I mean, get back to some Gen X vibes.”
Her conquest of OnlyFans, as de Matteo describes it, is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s been financially liberating, but on the other, she now finds herself a controversial figure. “I’ve never been in the spotlight,” she says, beyond the shows she’s featured on. “My personal life has never been up for question by anybody, because who fucking cares? When the OnlyFans thing came out, I was like, why the fuck does anyone gives a shit about it? I thought I’d make a couple thousand dollars, get by. I did not know that it was going to be that explosive.” As a result, she says, “the Christian conservatives think I’m a whore,” while “a lot of Italians and a lot of Sopranos fans frown upon what I’ve done. I get it. The liberals think I’m a piece of shit because I didn’t comply to the vaccine mandate. I can’t win. I joke around like I’m a man without a country.”
The entire experience, it seems, has strengthened de Matteo’s moral convictions and political outlook, which are closely tied to her family. She recounts how, when considering the option of obtaining a fake vaccine card in order to work, her teenage daughter talked her out of it, saying, “You taught us never to lie.” (Her daughter, de Matteo also mentions while apologizing for tearing up, has lately been telling her, “I’m so proud of you, mama.”) Her son and daughter, she says, are crucial to her understanding of the broader world. “The kids, they’re teaching me what’s happening in society, because I’m not,” she explains. “I don’t pay attention to what’s happening out there. Because I know the news is bogus half the time, so the kids bring it to me.”
Aside from government and media, de Matteo is highly suspicious of corporations and big money — which plays a part in her reluctance to seek a Hollywood comeback even if her vaccination status were no longer an obstacle. She cites the actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023, describing the way studios and streamers “get to take a huge chunk of the pie, but we’re all sort of just slaves to the system” as a source of disillusionment. “I honestly don’t know that I want to play anybody but myself right now,” she says. “I think that I’m finally in [that] place after 52 years of being on this earth and always hiding behind really awesome characters. Like if there was an Adriana character again… [Sopranos creator] David Chase, I was with him a few weeks ago. He goes, ‘I bet I could make you act again.’ I was like, ‘Damn straight you could, and you might be the only one.’”
For now, anyway, she’s satisfied to be working on different ventures — and speaking out on the subjects that matter to her. Like many Americans, she’s alarmed by the polarization of the country. She says that so-called “cancel culture,” which she’s recently criticized, is partly to blame. “What is cancel culture? It’s funny, you know, but in a lot of ways it’s dangerous, too,” she says. “You bring up these beautiful words of equity and inclusion, and then it basically just did the exact opposite of what it was meant to do. I think that it was always meant to tear people apart. All of these social issues are just a way to keep everybody at war with each other.”
Precisely where de Matteo fits into this battle remains to be seen. “One of my friends said to me, ‘You’re not going to please everybody, you’re gonna have to burn the whole forest down to let new trees grow,’” she says. “I have a funny dream of doing a daytime talk show with people who have their opposing opinions, and I’m trying to find a way for them to agree that they have more in common than they don’t. If there’s a way get people to really try to love each other again, that would be something that would appeal to me.”
Then she floats a slight tweak of that idealistic pitch. “I’m going full daytime here, you know what I mean? The Drea Springer Show,” she says, laughing. The reference to Jerry Springer, a show where guests routinely antagonized the audience and attempted to assault one another on stage, hardly fits de Matteo’s goal of a mutually respectful forum that strengthens community. Of the two visions, though, it’s easy to predict which would be the runaway hit.