How OnlyFans Saved ‘Sopranos’ Actress Drea de Matteo’s Life

March 9, 2024
DARKLADY

Although Reluctant to Join, 52-Year-Old Beauty Makes Bank.

OnlyFans had an offer that even Andriana La Cerva couldn’t resist. The New Jersey “Mob Wife” of Sopranos fame was portrayed by Drea de Matteo. Due to COVID mandates and a resulting lack of work, the role she played for five seasons became the actress’s primary source of fame and dwindling fortune. At one point, she had only $10 in her bank account. OnlyFans changed all of that.

With her home both flooded and in foreclosure, her agent freshly having dumped her, her mother recently passed and the woman she described as her “other mom” to the Daily Mail suffering from dementia and running short on money for caregivers, de Matteo was desperate to find a way to keep her home and family together. During a conversation with her family, she says that they jokingly suggested that she join OnlyFans.

Despite her initial unenthusiastic decision to give it a try, de Matteo decided to launch what she calls “a really controversial podcast” about politics on the platform. To spice things up, she thought she might have her husband Robbie Staebler rub her feet. It didn’t take her long to realize that not only were a lot of her fans eager to follow her to OnlyFans but they wanted to see more than her partner rubbing her feet.

According to de Matteo, who spoke to Rolling Stone, “People are really excited about granny porn.” Given that her fans think that she looks amazing for a so-called granny, the actress is likely selling herself short. Five minutes after posting a few lingerie pictures for her subscribers, she raised enough money to pay off her mortgage. “It saved us,” she told the Daily Mail. “OnlyFans saved my life, 100 percent.”

For a nominal monthly fee, the actress with mainstream roles in Sons of Anarchy, Desperate Housewives, and Shades of Blue, greets her OnlyFans subscribers with a saucy closeup of her cleavage while she wears a red-white-and-blue bikini top. “For the most part, I think I look good,” she told People. “The best part about it is I get to be heavier. I don’t look good in the pictures if I’m skinny. Before photo shoots, I get to eat and eat. I get to bulk up to look better.”

The carbo-loading Italian has earned enough money to not only pay off her house and keep her family from homelessness but also invest in her fashion business, Ultrafree. Inspired by her son Waylon, who de Matteo described to the Daily Mail as “a hype beast lunatic,” the limited-run garments have a lofty goal, to make “freedom cool again.”

Unsurprisingly, de Matteo has received more than her fair share of criticism, mostly from what she calls “Christian conservatives,” but also from Sopranos fans. While talking to Fox News, she explained “so, everyone’s in their underwear and being sexy on Instagram and I don’t do that. But I can do that and get paid for it. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

Those who want more of de Matteo in a Safe for Work-ish context can visit her TikTok account, where, among other things, she extols the virtues of wearing animal print underwear to keep men from straying because they know their woman is a “wild freak.” Also required for the proper Mob Wife look are stiletto platform shoes, low-cut and unzipped necklines, a padded bra, a lot of gold chains, copious diamonds, and an Italian horn.

Despite all the praise that de Matteo has for OnlyFans, during an interview with Adam Corolla she confided that she would discourage her daughter from becoming an OnlyFans model. “Why? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you! I’m at the end of my life! It’s over! Who cares?” Corolla, who admitted he knew nothing about OnlyFans, agreed, concluding that it is “a stepping stone to pornography.”

Stepping stone or not, de Matteo sums up her life right now by saying “I’m just being an Italian lady in the world, eating spaghetti and pasta and steak.”