Drea de Matteo never planned on being a career actress.
“It never interested me,” “The Sopranos” star admitted to Fox News Digital. “After ‘The Sopranos,’ I really had no interest in doing it anymore. I did it to pay bills when I needed to. I would take jobs when it was absolutely necessary. But to just continue being in that hamster wheel of Hollywood, I just didn’t have an interest in it.”
De Matteo, who is launching a new podcast called “THE ULTRAFREE PODCAST,” added, “I always knew that when I needed to pay the bills, it would happen.”
That was until the pandemic hit.
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De Matteo said she and her boyfriend’s lives “fell apart during COVID” when he left his band and she was forced to join OnlyFans because her house was in foreclosure.
“The breaking point was when I had to join OnlyFans to save my home,” the 54-year-old explained. “We were in foreclosure over the mandates. Not even over the mandate. They [the California government], this whole thing that was set up, forbearances, ‘Take a forbearance, take a longer forbearance, do this, do that. We got you covered. We’re going to take care of everybody.’ And then nobody was taken care of. And then letters were coming to the door.”
WATCH: ‘SOPRANOS’ STAR DREA DE MATTEO NEVER WANTED TO BE A CAREER ACTRESS
At the time, she didn’t feel like she could fall back on acting because of how vocal she was about her stance on vaccines during the pandemic.
“I’m not allowed to do it anymore really because I … I guess I was too, I don’t know, transparent,” she admitted.
She said her new podcast morphed out of her joining OnlyFans, which was originally supposed to be a podcast.
“The OnlyFans was supposed to be a podcast on OnlyFans, behind a paywall so that nobody would censor us,” she explained. “‘Cause we did wanna talk about the actual politics of the time. Thank God we never did it.”
She said her refusal of the COVID vaccine “turned into a political conversation even though it’s a non-political topic. So ‘ULTRAFREE’ is about that. It’s like, these are not political ideas. These are not, this is team humanity.”
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Because of the California mandates at the time, De Matteo said she went from the “middle class to no class, and then I went on OnlyFans and then, boom, I was like zero class, you know? Oh my God. But I don’t care. Like, I don’t care what anybody thinks. You know, I care about my kids and that’s it.”
WATCH: DREA DE MATTEO DESCRIBES WHAT BEING ‘ULTRAFREE’ MEANS TO HER AS SHE LAUNCHES NEW PODCAST
Amid the vaccine controversy, she said her agent dropped her “without a phone call,” and her manager told her, “‘I’m not involved in your OnlyFans decision.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, ‘cause you know I’m broke though? You know I have no money to pay for my family to eat and this old lady who needs medical care,’” she added, referring to her mother, who was suffering from dementia, and her nanny, who raised her, who she said was dying at the time.
Eventually, she left her manager.
“He didn’t get rid of me over it all, but he wasn’t willing to help me on any level, and I was in a bad place,” she said.
De Matto explained that the “ULTRAFREE PODCAST,” which debuts on Monday, will be topical, but it won’t have celebrity guests.
“There’s so many people out there talking about the same stuff,” she said of other podcasts. “I think we have to keep asking questions.”
