Jamie-Lynn Sigler says the scrutiny around her appearance during The Sopranos was so relentless that it shaped how she felt on set from the start. The 44-year-old actor, who played Meadow Soprano, said she was heavily scrutinised and made fun of because of the way she looked, and that one caller even phoned a live radio show to say friends had placed bets on how much weight she had gained between seasons.

Sigler said the reaction to her appearance was not just embarrassing. It was devastating. She said the criticism confirmed fears she had already carried, including the feeling that she did not look like the Hollywood stars she saw on television. “I was already coming into it not looking like a Hollywood star and how these people that I was seeing on the CW shows that I loved looked like,” she said. “I had somebody call me live on a radio show and tell me that they had bets with their friends how much weight I had gained in between seasons.”

She made the comments on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast as part of a broader reflection on the toll the show’s attention took on her mental health and self-image. Sigler has also written about those struggles in her memoir, And So It Is... A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope, where she detailed an eating disorder and said she worked through many of the issues alone in her own head because she did not know how to ask for help or open herself up.

The pressures around her appearance did not stop with public commentary. Sigler said that between the pilot episode of The Sopranos and the rest of the first season, she lost a lot of weight and got a nose job, leaving her “40 pounds lighter with a different face pretty much.” Even then, she said, she believed she might be fired. “I knew that they were confronting her about my size and my face and I was convinced I was gonna get fired,” she said. Showrunners spoke to her mother about the changes and toyed with the idea of letting her go.

They kept her, and Sigler said she is grateful for that decision. But she said the message she took from the moment lasted for the rest of filming. “I'm obviously grateful that they did but that sort of, unfortunately, set the tone for me for the rest of the shooting of that show that I just felt so less than,” she said. The force of that reaction, more than two decades later, still frames how she describes the price of growing up in public on one of television’s defining dramas.