Mantegna believes that his casting on The Simpsons came about thanks to his turn in the third installment of the classic Godfather trilogy, which had premiered just the year before. "I don't doubt that it came out of the fact that Godfather III had opened," he asserts. "And I thought, I get it. They created this character, and since I played Joey Zasa — I played the big, mean villain in probably most high-profile part of a trilogy of movies ever made — I get it, why they thought maybe that would be fun for me to play the character. But I thought to myself, I don't want it to be a reboot of Joey Zasa. In other words, I didn't want to create that this character is an offshoot of that character. That would just be a mistake."
So, instead, Mantegna looked to his family for inspiration. "I have a dear uncle, my Uncle Willy, who's my mother's brother," Mantegna says. "My father died when I was only 23 years old, so my Uncle Willy kind of became a surrogate dad for me for the rest of his life, and he lived into his 90s. At this point in his life, he was probably in his early 70s. And he and I were so close that I thought to myself, 'You know what? It might be fun to use Uncle Willy's voice as my voice for this character.' So, when I got to my first lines of Fat Tony and I had to say whatever I had to say in that first episode, I just started talking like him. Nobody said stop, so I just did it, thinking, 'Okay, we'll see...' Anybody who knew me well or knew my family or my relatives, they'd know instantly that I was doing Willy."
