Bobby Cannavale reflects on ‘Vinyl’s’ failure: I ‘feel like I let Marty down’

Bobby Cannavale feels like he did one of the worst things someone can do in Hollywood: He let Marty down. He didn’t actually, and what happened wasn’t his fault, but Cannavale still feels bad about his experience on the 2016 HBO series “Vinyl,” and he opened up about it in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Cannavale starred in one of the only truly unsuccessful projects of Martin Scorsese’s career, “Vinyl,” which Scorsese co-created, executive-produced, and directed the pilot. Despite its pedigree – Terence Winter, of “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Sopranos,” served as showrunner, and Mick Jagger helped develop it — the 1970s music industry drama never found its footing, and it was renewed and then unrenewed for Season 2.

It was Cannavale’s first lead role in a TV show, and he was coming off a supporting actor Emmy win for playing psychotic mobster Gyp Rosetti on “Boardwalk Empire.” Scorsese was so impressed with his performance on that show that he recruited Cannavale to play coked-up New York record executive Richie Finestra, who gets involved in the punk rock scene that’s just starting to take shape. But it didn’t work out, due to low ratings, tepid reviews, and what Cannavale believes was underinvestment from HBO. “All these things seemed to conspire against us,” Cannavale told Vanity Fair. “I was shocked, frankly, by the reaction to it. I did feel like we’d created something special. When something that has that much profile fails like that, I couldn’t help but feel like I let Marty down.”

He said that Scorsese developed the project for years. The director treated the pilot like one of his movies, but HBO did not. “That was one of those ones that you go, Well, shit, it really didn’t get put out the right way,” Cannavale said. “You can Monday-morning quarterback these things: We really were screwed out by circumstances that we didn’t have any control over. Whether it was the fact that HBO didn’t promote it as a new Martin Scorsese movie; they didn’t let their audience know it was a two-hour pilot; they didn’t really take advantage of what they had; they premiered us after ‘Girls’ — didn’t make any sense. We premiered at ten at night for a two-hour pilot.” 

Cannavale was disappointed in how the show was “brushed aside,” and it still pains him that something that meant so much to Scorsese and himself didn’t work out. “I can’t help but feel like, F–k, why couldn’t that be successful?” Cannavale said. “The one thing that I did with Martin Scorsese is the one thing that wasn’t successful?” 

Cannavale struggled for about a year after “Vinyl.” Everyone, including Scorsese, told him that it wasn’t his fault that the show failed, but it was his face on the buses and billboards.  “I always described that period as the stinky year,” he said. “I had a stink on me, and I could feel it.” The fact that the show was renewed and canceled made it worse. “It was like a double f–k-you.” 

He worried that his career was over, but obviously that was not the case. After six months of depression, he did a play, “The Hairy Ape,” that broke him out of his funk, and then he went back to being one of TV’s most dependable supporting players. 

Cannavale can currently be seen in the films “Ezra” and “Unstoppable.” He’s a two-time Emmy winner, for guest starring on “Will & Grace” and for the aforementioned “Boardwalk Empire” performance. And he worked with Scorsese again on “The Irishman.”