Drea de Matteo has admitted her successful OnlyFans career was prompted by her teenage daughter’s friend.

The 52-year-old made a name for herself in her late twenties when she landed the role of Adriana La Cerva, starring opposite the likes of James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli in The Sopranos.

She stayed in that role up until 2006 before going on to appear in shows including Desperate Housewives and Sons of Anarchy.

These days, de Matteo is making a lot of dollar from OnlyFans, a career move that begun from a very unlikely source.

Speaking to ABC News, de Matteo insists that she doesn’t ‘like to play victim’, though she was very much in a time of financial despair a few years ago.

The actor – who shares daughter Alabama, 16, and son Waylon, 12, with ex Shooter Jennings – was prepared to sell her family home, downsize and work in a supermarket to help the cash flow.

Drea de Matteo makes OnlyFans content. (JOCE/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

But a Covid-19 vaccine mandate in place at the time prevented her from working anywhere as she didn’t want to have the jab.

“At that time during the mandate, I couldn’t even work at a bookstore, I needed a vaccine card, I needed a barcode to survive,” she told ABC News.

De Matteo went on to explain that Alabama’s friend had suggested OnlyFans as a potential money-making avenue so the star decided to give it a go.

And after posting a selfie on the subscription-based platform, she made enough to pay off her mortgage.

“That was a fluke, a really lucky fluke and if I had to do it all over again, I would have done it sooner,” de Matteo added.

“I don’t care what any of these haters want to say. I put a picture up, a selfie, and holy cow. OK, we just paid the real estate company back within a day.

“And immediately I was like ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be OK’.”

The actor was introduced to OnlyFans by her daughter’s friend. (Instagram/@dreadematteo)

De Matteo went on to say she gets ‘way more on OnlyFans’ compared to her work on The Sopranos – though she admitted it ‘depends on the month’.

“I’ve only been doing it a couple of months,” she said.

“People can speculate, it’s really not as much as everyone thinks,” the 52-year-old continued. “I’m still not rich by any means, considering what rich looks like today, but we’re OK and we’ll survive and I need to figure out other ways to maintain my home.

“I know it is a career for some women, that was a bandaid, OnlyFans was a bandaid for me.”

She has previously credited OnlyFans for ‘saving her life’.

Earlier this year, de Matteo told the Daily Mail: “It saved us. OnlyFans saved my life, 100 percent. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but it really did save us.

“Anybody that wants to condemn me and put me down, go for it. I just hope you never find yourself in the position I was in to take care of two little kids.

“It saved my home of many years that was very important to us.”