January 14, 2005 - Drea de Matteo's career as an actress has all come as a surprise. She attended NYU's prestigious film school and, for all intents and purposes, expected to become a director. She took a few acting classes and wound up with parts in a few small movies while she tried to get her career as a director off the ground. Then her acting career suddenly took off in a way she never could have predicted. De Matteo landed a small part on a new HBO mobster show that was supposed to only last an episode or two. Of course, the show became the wildly successful The Sopranos.

So de Matteo put the directing on hold and went along for the ride. Her character, Adrianna, soon became a mainstay of the show and, by the third season, her character had developed a separate storyline that was to become one of the most integral portions of the show. Last year, de Matteo's Sopranos run came to a screeching halt when news of Adrianna's FBI cooperation came out to Tony (James Gandolfini) and Christopher (Michael Imperioli). As they say in the mob world, Adrianna was soon "sleeping with the fishes" and de Matteo was out of a job. The extreme success of the show opened many new doors for de Matteo, and she was soon offered parts in the John Carpenter remake Assault on Precinct 13 and, to her biggest surprise, a part on the new sitcom Joey.

Now Joey is a hit and Assault on Precinct 13 is about to hit theaters. IGN FilmForce was at the recent press day for Assault and spoke with the actress. In a refreshing change from most interviews, de Matteo was honest and straightforward about her career and the work she's doing, leading to one of the more intriguing interviews I can remember.

The role of Iris in Assault was, in de Matteo's admission, not the most challenging role she's ever had. "To be completely honest with you, I didn't choose the character because it's not like I needed to play another Italian American girl who was a slut. I chose it because of the cast and because Jean-Fran�ois had never seen Sopranos, he had picked me based on this movie 'R Xmas I had done. He wanted that character, so the fact that I knew he was going to make a movie, sort of like, Abel (Director of 'R Xmas), after I'd seen his original film, his first film, I knew he was an Abel fan. I had a feeling the movie would be sort of as if Abel had a Hollywood budget. It would be the kind of movie he would have made."

	-Rogue Pictures Matteo shows off her legs and smile in Assault

Considering de Matteo's own directing aspirations, she is always eager to work with directors who she can learn from. "Jean-Francois was really trying. It was his first big American film, it was a huge action film, not an enormous budget, and explosions of snow. You watch someone keep their cool during all of that when a million problems are coming your way, and I had to leave to go and do Joey, that was not easy I'm sure for part of the time because I was one of the only ones who had to be there all the time because I was wallpaper in the movie… Watching Sopranos was definitely a little more, more than watching Abel, watching Alex Steyermark, he was a first time director on Prey for Rock and Roll… Watching the first timers, I learned a little more from that. My thing with directing, that was really with the actors. I see what I want visually and then I get up and make sure I've got the right BP for that."

Having gone to film school herself, Matteo is familiar with the original Carpenter film as well as its origins in the Western genre and the films of Howard Hawks. "I saw the original Assault when I was about 25. I sort of remember it. I think the foundation of the movie is the same, but I think in this version we've opened it up to a whole other thing… I haven't really watched the movie yet, I've seen parts of it but it definitely feels like a Western in the way certain shots are set up. I mean, Laurence has always positioned them a certain way. He's always so low, he's always got his own thing when he walks down that corridor, God knows. But there's also this Hitchcockian thing going on, and the music that I heard, I don't know if it's the same music there, you really feel like you're watching an older film to some degree… It [didn't] feel like a real Hollywood film when we were shooting it. It was definitely, like dirtier, and they had to fight for the ending, Jean also had to fight for that ending…"