Edie, over easy

Rather than lurking discreetly in the back of this echoey joint, which helps caffeinate Tribeca's morning shift, the "Sopranos" TV icon sits front and center at a window table overlooking the street. As she thumbs her PDA, a task that Carmela, with her talon-like nails, might have avoided, the café customers all notice her - but no one looks. Ah, New York.

The scene, without the requisite publicity "people" as a buffer between the actor and the world, suggests a well-adjusted TV star with strong boundaries. The city's bus stops are wallpapered with ads for Falco's new Showtime series, "Nurse Jackie," which premieres tomorrow night at 10:30, and "The Sopranos" still reverberates loudly two years after it left the air with a question mark; but Falco, 45, remains unimpressed with herself. She's not playing the princess, at least not today, and she's all hyper Long Island tawk as she answers questions, a maroon band pulling her hair up off her forehead. Her eyes are sky blue.

Interestingly, when it comes to her experience with breast cancer, her medical journey, and her sobriety, Falco is remarkably forthcoming. But when she talks about "The Sopranos," she maintains a cautious distance. "The actual end of 'Sopranos' stuff is very private," she says. "I'm not being precious. Truth is, I wouldn't know how to begin to talk about it. I'm an awkward kid from Long Island who had a dream about going to New York and becoming an actress. That's who I still am in my core. And I fell into this phenomenon. Huge. Huge. This doesn't happen to most people.

"So the 10 years we spent together, and the end of it, and running into one of my friends on the street, and the full memory of all that, the longing to grab hold of my friends - that's all totally, totally private."

"I don't think 'The Sopranos' changed her, as far as her personality or her core values go," says Richie Jackson, Falco's manager and a "Nurse Jackie" co-executive producer who has known her since she first signed on to the mob series. "She looked at it as a job, and a great job, and she loved it." Falco - a single mother to two adopted kids, Anderson, 4, and Macy, 1 - doesn't steep herself in the show-business milieu, Jackson says. "[It's] a compartmentalized part of her life."

"It was frustrating for me on 'The Sopranos' a little bit," she says, "when I'd come two or three or days a week, and I'd hear a story about something that happened - you know, the prop guy fell over, ha-ha. I was always longing to be more a part of it. . . . I kept saying, give me more to do. I'm spinning my wheels at home."

One of the miracles of "Nurse Jackie" is that, despite her indelible, Emmy-winning performance as Carmela, Falco utterly disappears into this new and very different role. Jackie is as cool as Carmela was hot, as New York as Carmela was New Jersey, and she doesn't suffer fools - even when the fool is a slippery ER doctor played by Peter Facinelli. Inevitably, Jackie will be compared to another prickly, addicted TV caregiver, Hugh Laurie's Dr. House. But Falco makes Jackie into a moving heroine with her own particular moral failings, including a Robin Hood approach to organ donation and an extramarital affair with the hospital pharmacologist (played by Paul Schulze, Father Phil on "The Sopranos").

Pulling off her wedding ring every day for work after leaving her husband and two kids in Queens, Jackie fits right in with the many split characters on Showtime's schedule, on "Weeds," "United States of Tara," and "Dexter." But the closest series in tone to "Nurse Jackie" may be FX's "Rescue Me," another New York-set black comedy whose rebel hero deals with addiction. It's a grimedy - "I'm stealing that, it's mine," she jokes about the word - with a decidedly Chayefskian twist on a health-care system that objectifies the patient.

Falco says she has never worried about being typecast after "The Sopranos," and it amuses her when people mention Bravo's Carmela-like "Real Housewives of New Jersey" to her. "People can't stereotype me unless I let them," she says.

"I was always a tomboy," she says. "My whole childhood I was barefoot running the streets, climbing trees. . . . And this tomboy thing follows me around a bit. I don't approach acting from a female point of view, but from a human point of view." In her career path, which included stints on "Law & Order" and "Oz" and independent features such as "Laws of Gravity" before "The Sopranos," she has never played the ingenue.

She says she's not interested in getting nipped, tucked, and injected - at least, not now. "I'm lucky in that the way I look has never gotten me anything. And far as I know, has never not gotten me anything. I've never been up for roles where it's about, you know, that. I hope I can remain brave growing older and looking older.

"We'll see how it goes."

"I was on a popular TV show, so my treatment was not the normal woman's treatment in the breast cancer world," she says. "I got the most famous, biggest, fanciest doctor in the world. And I'm very grateful for the treatment that I've been given. It's so odd. Ten years ago I could have gotten breast cancer and would have been no less worthy of all this fancy treatment, but I wouldn't have gotten it. My family's like, 'Shut up, just go to these doctors.'

"I would be whisked off to these rooms, while there are women in the waiting rooms in their hospital gowns looking down with their arms around a cup of tea, and it's [deleted] heartbreaking, because that's me, that's the real me, that's the me that I've been far longer than this other one. I feel like a fraud, because I feel like I should say, 'No, I'll wait in the waiting room like everybody else.' But part of me is, 'Take it, take what's being handed to you.'

"So I haven't found a comfortable place to exist with all of this yet. I'm in the middle. And I'm doing the best I can."

Interestingly, Jackie is an active, highly functional addict, snorting her way through her days in the ER. She's a focused healer, but she uses crushed-up painkillers to dull the relentless intensity of her work. "I've traveled in a world of addiction my whole life, being in the arts, coming from a family that has struggled with a genetic predisposition for addiction," Falco says. "I'm also well beyond the point where it feels dangerous for me to travel in this territory. Years ago I would have said this is too scary for me, but it's not anymore. I identified myself with that kind of behavior for so many years that it actually felt very natural to be in the bathroom doing something sinister [while filming]. It felt like a part of me that I almost missed.

"I think about Christmas when I was a kid, it was so magnificent, me and my brothers and sisters and parents made such a big deal about it. I long for it sometimes in a way I can't even explain. I also know it's over. I feel the same way about drugs. I have these memories of people I was with, things I said, experiences I had when I was [messed] up. And those days are gone. And I look back on many of them very fondly. Obviously not all of them, or I'd still be doing it."

She recalls skipping gatherings with "The Sopranos" cast, who, she says, had "beautiful parties." "It has to do with being Italian - a lot of food, a lot of wine, which is all celebratory. I longingly would see them partaking, it was a little heartbreaking. Not that I was ever tempted to participate. I was already well beyond that. It just made me sad that genetically I was incapable. And I would hear, 'Oh yeah we went to so-and-so, we were out all night,' and I thought, 'Waaa.' But it's fine. I also would go home and give myself a little kiss, like good for you, sweetie, you're doing what's good for you."

Having learned to take care of herself, Falco feels she has been well cared for by her industry. "The way people show respect for what I do," she says, "it's like perfect parenting. You really learn a lot about how to take care of your kids by the way I've been treated in this business." And for a brief moment, in the middle of Peace & Love, Falco gets just a little misty-eyed.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.