Drea's back from the dead

LOS ANGELES — When television viewers last saw Drea de Matteo, she was being brutally murdered on "The Sopranos." Not that the brutality was anything new for her character, Adrianna, who had been getting beaten up by her boyfriend, Christopher, pretty much since she first appeared on the show.

When viewers next see de Matteo, she'll be playing Joey Tribbiana's tough-minded, wise-cracking older sister, Gina, on the "Friends" spin-off, "Joey."

"I guess I'll be throwing the punches this time," de Matteo said. "I'm not going to be getting the (expletive) beat out of me every week."

Of course, it's also going to be considerably different working on a half-hour sitcom that's filmed in front of a studio audience and airs on a major broadcast network instead of an hourlong drama shot on location for a pay-cable channel. And chances are that de Matteo is going to be seen by a whole lot more people in her new role.

"It's a huge difference for me. It's a whole different medium," de Matteo said. "But it's really exciting. It kind of takes me back to when I started, which was on stage.

"The whole fame thing, I couldn't care about. . . . I'm interested in just having fun. I was sick and tired of crying every single week. I'm excited just to have some fun and have a break from all that insanity and all those beatings and chokings and hair pullings."

"Joey" executive producers Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan were fans of de Matteo's work on "The Sopranos." And she "just blew us away" when she auditioned, Silveri said.

"She's the first person who made it seem like a real character, not a b-----," Goldberg-Meehan said

"And you really believed immediately that she was Joey's sister," said executive producer Kevin Bright. "It was just that chemistry between her and Matt (Le Blanc) where they played off of each other that we knew that there was something great to come out of this."

Not that de Matteo was looking for a sitcom.

"Honestly, I never thought about doing comedy," she said. "I never thought about it until the opportunity presented itself. Also, because my character on 'The Sopranos,' in a lot of ways, is kind of funny just based on the way that she speaks and the way she dresses the way she does, even though it was a dramatic show and role.

"But I knew my character was going (to die), and I loved that character more than anything. I sort of get to play a similar-type character to her on this show."