Trivia / Boardwalk Empire

• Ability over Appearance: Most of the actors portraying historical or semi-historical characterd share little resemblance (or none whatsoever) with their historical counterpart
• Accidentally-Correct Writing: At the time the show was made, Nan Britton's claim to have had a baby with Warren G. Harding was considered a lie. But shortly after it was portrayed, new DNA evidence actually backed it up.
• Actor-Inspired Element: Jack Huston came up with Harrow's guttural voice himself, using Marlon Brando's cotton-in-the-mouth trick from The Godfather.
• Dawson Casting:
  • 37 year old Stephen Graham as 21 year old Al Capone.
  • Also, 30-year-old Michael Pitt as 23-year-old Jimmy Darmody.
  • Anatol Yusef as Meyer Lansky. No way is he 18.
  • 62 year-old Greg Antonacci as 38 year-old Johnny Torrio.
• Fake Nationality:
  • The very German Eddie Kessler is played by Anthony Laciura, who is of Italian descent. The casting crew was in fact surprised when they learned that Laciura, who had made his entire introduction in a German accent, was actually an Italian-American from the Bronx.
  • The Italian Gyp Rosetti is played by Italian-American Bobby Cannavale
  • Fake American: Englishmen Stephen Graham, Anatol Yusef, Jack Huston, Marc Pickering, and Ian Hart as Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Richard Harrow, young Nucky Thompson, and young Ethan Thompson, respectively.
  • Fake Irish: Scottish Kelly Macdonald and Englishman Charlie Cox as Margaret Rohan Schroeder/Thompson and Owen Sleater. Also, Scot Tony Curran as Margaret's brother Eamon and American Ted Rooney as the Sinn Féin politician John McGarrigle. Irish-American Nucky Thompson is played by Italian-American Steve Buscemi who is of half-Irish descent.
  • Also, the French Isabelle Jeunet is played by Swiss actress Anna Katarina.
  • Washington-born Jeffrey Wright plays Trinidarian gangster Valentin Narcisse.
• The Other Darrin: The role of Will, Eli's oldest son, was recast for Season 4.
• Playing Against Type:
  • While Steve Buscemi is no stranger to playing criminal characters, he's always been weaselly supporting characters, not the suave man in charge.
  • Michael Stuhlbarg, best known up to this point for playing Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man, now plays Arnold Rothstein, a ruthless mobster. After this series, Stuhlbarg received more roles as criminals and dangerous schemers.
  • Perennial bedwetter Michael Pitt as certified hardass Jimmy Darmody.
  • Jim True-Frost's appearance in season 5 as the most famous no-nonsense cop in history Eliot Ness is hilarious to anyone who remembers him as the perpetual screw-up Roland Pryzbylewski on The Wire.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Anonymous reports from crew members claim both Michael Pitt and Paz de la Huerta were written off of the show for prima donna behavior on the set, with Lucy being Put on a Bus and Jimmy being Killed Off for Real. Showrunner Terence Winter has strongly denied that Pitt was fired for on-set behavior, however.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot:
  • Terence Winter and Dabney Coleman confirmed that the Commodore's stroke was written in when Coleman was diagnosed with throat cancer, whose treatment made him hard to speak, and as a result sidelined what was first intended to be a large part as the season's Big Bad. This had far reaching consequences in the show's storyline, since it pushed Jimmy to the front of the conspiracy, and made it impossible for Nucky to realistically forgive him. As a result, Jimmy's (and by extension, Angela's) storyline had to be cut earlier than expected, with Gillian and Richard being brought to the front in Season 3 to fill the gap.
  • Charlie Cox said that they wrote a fight scene for Owen's death in "A Man, A Plan..." but they didn't shoot it in the end. According to Winter, this was because they had to suspend filming when a chunk of plaster from the ceiling of the old baths were they were going to shoot that scene fell off. In the meantime the rest of the episode was put together and, after watching it, they realized that not seeing the fight actually made The Reveal at the end of the episode, when Owen's body is shipped back to Nucky in a box after the hit's failure, more powerful.
• What Could Have Been:
  • James Gandolfini was the first choice to play Nucky Thompson. Winter remarks that he had an uncanny resemblance to the actual Nucky, but having just finished his stint as Tony Soprano, he opted out to pursue other roles and to avoid being typecast. Alec Baldwin was also considered.
  • The first casting calls for Season 1 called for the introduction in the season finale of "Declan", Margaret's long estranged brother who was now linked to the IRA. Instead, Season 2 divided this character and introduced separately Margaret's brother Eamonn, a Brooklyn subway-digger with no interest in politics, and Owen, an IRA enforcer completely unrelated to Margaret.
  • Aleksa Palladino revealed in an interview that before Jimmy had to be killed off, one considered plot line for the third season involved Angela and Jimmy moving to New York City, and Angela meeting a female activist that would introduce her to Anarchism.
  • The first casting calls for Al Capone's brothers Frank and Ralph came out in Season 2, but Domenick Lombardozzi (seen in The Wire and Entourage) was confirmed as Ralph only in Season 4. In Season 2 Al mentions that he is going to Brooklyn to take his brothers and bring them to Chicago.
  • Shortly after the Season 2 finale there was a very talked about call for (and even leaked auditions of) a new "young", "sexy" recurring gangster character named Bud Matheson that was perhaps too reminiscent of Jimmy. A similar call for a "young", "sexy" college freshman called Michael McHugh came after Season 3. So far, neither seems to have made the cut in the end, though elements of both likely found their way into one-shot character Rowland Smith and Eli's eldest son, Willie.
  • If Dabney Coleman had not had throat cancer, the Commodore would not have been incapacitated early in Season 2 by a stroke and remained the season's main antagonist. It's likely that the season would end with Jimmy killing the Commodore at the request of Nucky (as Word of God is that he would die in the season in every case), instead of Jimmy doing it on his own volition, and Nucky allowing Jimmy to live if he left Atlantic City (since the Commodore, not Jimmy, would be the one to order Nucky's assassination).
  • Two seasons and a good chunk of another were excised because of the show's early cancellation. One can only imagine how Eli and Van Alden managed to survive the Chicago gangster wars, how and why Rothstein was killed in the show, or what part Nucky might have played in Machado's Cuba and the Castellammarese War.

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