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Tony and Johnny Sack are polar opposites in many ways. Johnny is invariably cool, with a deep respect for the old mob values. He dearly loves his wife Ginny despite the fact she is, shall we say, Rubenesque. In one unforgettable sequence last season, Tony's crew was having a good laugh over the size of Ginny's backside when Johnny walked in and wanted to know what was so funny. Putting personal ahead of business, he even ordered a hit on Ralphie Cifaretto for allegedly making an off-colour joke about Ginny's heft. He was eventually talked out of it. While the rest of these latter-day gangsters only pay lip service to the old Mafia code of honour, Johnny really believes in it. "He's anal retentive, he wants everything the way the rule book says," Curatola believes. "To see Tony Soprano be so self-indulgent, women and drinking and so on, Johnny doesn't want that." Besides, Johnny has a big stake in Tony's Jersey operation because if it proves to be a weak link, it can affect New York's pocket, too. "Johnny can't understand why everything can't just be like the Roman legions. You have to have discipline." And yet, Tony and Johnny do seem to share one trait: they're both much too sensitive and emotional for a job that requires cold blood, not hot, which may eventually lead to their respective downfalls. But despite the wise-guy ambience of the series, Curatola still believes it's not really a show about the mob. It's really about the human condition, he says, about a businessman who is under heavy stress both at home and at the office and who, like a Caesar trying to hold everything together, could crack at any moment. "You know, Tony Soprano could be a corporate raider, the rest of us could all be executives who plunder the bank account. It's all about greed, and it's about stress and it's about 'I know what I do is wrong. Why do I keep doing it?' " Asked where the Sopranos role fits in his acting career, Curatola, 51, says he's actually new to the business, having started only a dozen years ago with a part on a Law & Order episode. "I never suffered through the rejections of auditions and so on. This kind of fell into my lap, really," he says. "So for me this is like an out-of-body experience, you know?" -Jim MacCay.