Dr. Elliot Kupferberg

Elliot Kupferberg is Dr. Melfi's own psychiatrist and confidant, a smooth, self-assured colleague she leans on to process the ethical vertigo of treating a mob boss. He listens, theorizes, and offers opinions with the calm certainty of a man who trusts his own judgment completely, often nudging her toward conclusions she resists.

The casting is the joke and the point: a real filmmaker playing a therapist who talks in tidy, faintly pompous narratives, as if every session were a script he's already finished. Bogdanovich underplays it beautifully, giving Elliot a dry, donnish confidence that makes his moral blind spots about Tony that much funnier and sharper.