Anthony Soprano

AJ Soprano is Tony and Carmela's teenage son, coasting through prep school with mediocre grades and a general lack of urgency about anything. He wants video games, a car, and to be left alone, mostly indifferent to the family business humming beneath the surface of his suburban New Jersey life.

Robert Iler plays ordinary adolescent sullenness so convincingly that AJ becomes the show's proof of concept: even raised amid violence and money, a kid can still just be a kid, bored and self-absorbed. The writing uses him as a barometer of how much normalcy the family can actually buy, and Iler never overplays the irony.