11 Things You Don't Know About The Night Of

It's called Criminal Justice, and it stars Ben Whishaw.

The Night Of was Gandolfini's passion project, and he went to HBO to get it on air. At first the network said no, but when he changed it from an open series to a miniseries, it agreed. Robert De Niro also stepped in to replace him, but then dropped out due to scheduling issues.

He also has nothing but good things to say about him. "The way he would, for example, lay out treats and food for all of the crew on the days that he'd be working," Ahmed told Yahoo. "I just got this sense of him being a real kind of man of the people, and a really approachable, warm kind of guy. Obviously, he's one of the greats."

The project was stalled multiple times because of Gandolfini's death and the time it took to replace him. As Ahmed told Yahoo, "It's quite surreal, because we did begin it a long time ago, and it's been a very consistent feature of my life over the last four to five years, and I've only been acting for about 10 years, so that's almost half of my professional career."

The main character of Criminal Justice is white, but Ahmed told Spin that writer/creator Steve Zaillian didn't think that would fit the son of New York cab drivers. So instead, they looked for someone who is Pakistani.

"I remember that crane that came loose in Manhattan," Ahmed told Spin. "It was dangling over our hotel. I remember that we had to be evacuated, myself and Peyman [Moaadi], who plays my father, and Poorna [Jagannathan], who plays my mother. The next day we came into work and I remember James [Gandolfini] was talking about the hurricane and stuff."

Zaillian served as the writer, director, and executive producer for The Night Of, and before the show, his work was solely on the big screen. He won for writing on Schindler's List but also worked on Moneyball and Gangs of New York.

After Robert De Niro dropped the project, Steven Zaillian found out Turturro was open to doing work on television; he snatched him up with no questions asked. "And the truth is that I had a short list of actors at the beginning," Zaillian told A.V. Club. "John Turturro was on that list, and so was James Gandolfini. So for me, to consider John doing this was — I mean, I had already considered him doing it at the beginning!"

If you love Ahmed as Naz, then maybe you should watch what got him the role: the comedy Four Lions. "I went on YouTube to see what I could find," Zaillian said according to the Los Angeles Times. "I watched him in some clips from Four Lions. His performance in one of the posted scenes got my attention. . . . The scene, like the film, is comedic, but Riz was playing it straight. This, I felt, was a deft choice by an actor. To me, it made the scene work."

"John Turturro made this movie called Mac, which is about his father," Sparks, who plays Don Taylor, told Elle. "I love this movie. He directed and starred in it. I was, literally, like, 'I've seen Mac so many times.' And he was like, 'Oh, okay.' And then, after a while, he was like, 'Wow. Yeah. You really have seen it a lot.'"

"Steve is an absolute stickler," Ahmed told Los Angeles Times. "We would shoot the placing of a teacup 20 times. There would even be moments he when he would say to us, 'I need to be stopped.'"