Vera Farmiga and Jon Bernthal Join The Sopranos Prequel Cast

The Many Saints of Newark, New Line’s forthcoming The Sopranos prequel, just gained two more stellar cast members. Vera Farmiga and Jon Bernthal are both set to join the project, as first reported by Variety. While it’s still unclear what parts they’ll be stepping into, we do know that the film takes place during the Newark Riots in the 1960s.

In a recent interview with Deadline, The Sopranos creator David Chase said of the movie’s setting, “I was interested in Newark and life in Newark at that time. I used to go to down there every Saturday night for dinner with my grandparents. But the thing that interested me most was Tony’s boyhood. I was interested in exploring that.”

He elaborated further, mentioning that a young Tony Soprano will feature in the film: “The movie will deal with the tensions between the blacks and whites at the time, and Tony Soprano will be part of this, but as a kid.”

This was the golden age of the mob, one Tony would look back on with rose-tinted glasses. Expect plenty of sharp suits and suave characters in the movie because, as Chase told Deadline, “The mafia was very polished at that time, how they dressed and what they did. Those traditions were followed more loosely in the series. These weren’t guys who wore tracksuits, back then.”

Farmiga (besides being tied to that somehow-still-going horror franchise about the Warrens) will appear as Dr. Emma Russell, mother to Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison Russell, in the forthcoming film Godzilla: King of the Monsters. As for Bernthal, he returns to the small screen in season two of The Punisher on Friday (Jan. 18). The pair are starring opposite Alessandro Nivola (seen recently in You Were Never Here and long-ago-but-not-forgotten in Face/Off) in The Sopranos prequel. Nivola was recently cast as Dickey Moltisanti, the father of Tony’s nephew and protege Christopher.

Explore everything else we know about The Many Saints of Newark so far here.