After more than three years, James Gandolfini is heading back to HBO — and he looks nothing like Tony Soprano.

“It was shocking at first,” he jokes of the thick beard and full head of jet black hair he sports for the original movie “Cinema Verite.” “Hopefully people will get used to it. My wife asked me to wear the wig a couple of times.”

In the movie, the iconic “Sopranos” star flashes back to the ’70s with co-stars Diane Lane and Tim Robbins in the story of America’s first, unwitting reality TV stars.

He plays real-life filmmaker Craig Gilbert, who convinces a southern California family, the Louds, to let him film their day-to-day lives — including Mrs. Loud (Lane) coping with her husband’s (Robbins) extramarital affair — for a PBS series.

“What appealed to me was the subject matter and how [reality TV] was such an intellectual exercise in the beginning, and how it turned to such s- -t,” he says.

Of course, there are a few exceptions.

“That one with Brigitte Nielsen and Flava Flav [“The Surreal Life“] was the best,” he told The Post. “I used to watch that.”