The actor was set to take over the world after playing Christopher in The Sopranos. Now he’s on a roll after beating cocaine, typecasting and finding Buddha.
Why isn’t Michael Imperioli a huge A-list actor? Other people ponder over who killed President Kennedy, or the existence or otherwise of the Loch Ness monster, but this is the mystery that baffles me. When The Sopranos ended in 2007 Imperioli seemed the safest of bets for huge celebrity status. Only 41 at the time, and with the handsome looks reminiscent of Hollywood’s golden era (one part Tyrone Power to two parts Montgomery Clift), he was extraordinarily good as Christopher Moltisanti, Tony Soprano’s doomed henchman, and by the end of the show he had accrued four Emmy nominations and one win.
Yet his post-Sopranos career has been bafflingly fragmented — a part in The Lovely Bones, some Law & Order, lots of indie films. His recent glorious performance as the priapic father in the second series of The White Lotus only underlined how ridiculous it is that Imperioli isn’t one of those ubiquitous character actors, like Stanley Tucci, say, or Willem Dafoe. What happened? Surely his agent’s phone was ringing off the hook after Christopher was killed off in the final series?
“Not really,” he says when we meet at a café in west Hollywood, Los Angeles. “I think at the time a lot of people thought I was that character. Kind of like [the reality TV show] Jersey Shore and they’d found us all at the mall and put us on the show. Hollywood is very unimaginative when it comes to casting.”
This may explain the wider irony of The Sopranos. It’s the greatest TV series of all time, with some of the finest acting ever committed to the small screen, but only one of the actors had a properly stellar career afterwards: Edie Falco, who played Carmela. Maybe they were all just too convincing at playing mobsters (and to be fair, some did actually have connections to organised crime, such as Tony Darrow, who played Larry Barese, and Michael Squicciarini, who played Big Frank Cippolina). But Imperioli’s career feels studded with big moments that inexplicably failed to ignite.
I’ve been a fan of his since his first big role, when he was 23 and played the luckless barman Spider in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, very nearly stealing scenes from Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta. Even he looks back now and marvels at the confidence he had then; he decided to talk to De Niro in character between takes “because the last thing he wants is some fanboy fawning over him, like ‘I love you Mr De Niro, in Taxi Driver I loved that scene you did.’ So instead the first time he walked on set I walked up to him and said, ‘Jimmy, what do you want to drink?’ And he said, ‘A shot of scotch and a glass of water.’ I think he appreciated it.” He even suggested some set changes to Scorsese, such as turning the bar around so that Spider would face the gangsters playing cards (and — most importantly — Imperioli’s face would be on camera more). “And Scorsese said, ‘That’s a good idea, let the kid do that!’ " Afterwards Scorsese’s people offered him another job — but not in a film. Rather, it was answering phones in his development office. Didn’t he say, “Hey Marty, I want to act, not do work experience?”
“Oh, I didn’t want to bother him, and he had been so kind to me,” he says with the smile of the starstruck twentysomething he was.
He’s certainly having a moment now: his hit podcast, Talking Sopranos, got many people (including me) through lockdown. In it, he and his fellow Sopranos actor Steve Schirripa go through each episode, with Imperioli offering highbrow thoughts about storytelling and script structure, while Schirripa, brow lower, brought a more “waddyagonna do, the guy was a jerk” vibe. Then the second series of The White Lotus introduced him to a new generation of TV watchers who had missed The Sopranos. This even happened within the show’s cast: Aubrey Plaza decided to watch The Sopranos for the first time when she learnt he was on the cast, and every morning she would come to set and pepper Imperioli with questions about the episode she’d seen the night before. “Yeah, I think she got really into it. It was really nice,” he says, smiling.
He became especially close to F Murray Abraham, who played his lecherous father, and he talks about Abraham’s acting in a manner fans of Talking Sopranos will recognise as very characteristically Imperioli. “He has this very theatrical way of acting, but it’s rooted in raw truth. It’s a very rare combination, really effective and magical,” he says. (In a somewhat unfortunate example of life imitating art, after our interview Abraham, 83, announced that he had been fired from the Apple TV+ project Mythic Quest for sexual misconduct.) What does Imperioli think about the rumours that The White Lotus’s creator, Mike White, will bring his character back for season three? He makes the grimace of one who has learnt to manage his expectations. “I would love nothing more, but I think it’s unlikely.”
But Imperioli, 57, has long been adept at making his own work. “I’ve never thought, ‘OK, I need to wait around for some Broadway guy to cast me,’ because that still hasn’t happened,” he says. So in between acting gigs he wrote the film Summer of Sam, which was directed by Spike Lee; he also wrote several episodes of The Sopranos; he and his wife of 30 years, Victoria Chlebowski, with whom he has three grown-up children, started an off-Broadway theatre called Studio Dante; he wrote a novel; and he has a band, Zopa, which has been going on and off since 2006. The band is the reason we’re talking today, because they’re about to play their first London gig. “Music, acting, it’s all about what you’re expressing, and live performance is so much like acting, except with music people break the fourth wall and yell at you,” he says.
Maybe Imperioli simply lacks the thrusting ego necessary to become a celebrity. The thing he loved most about working on The Sopranos and The White Lotus, he says, was working in an ensemble: “Everyone working together to create the thing.” This is how he dreamt acting would be when he decided, the day before he was due to start medical school, to quit and study acting at the famed Lee Strasberg Institute instead. How did his parents, a bus driver and department store worker, react? “They kinda expected it. My mother always thought I’d wind up doing something creative,” he says. His heroes have always been artists with a capital A: “Patti Smith, Jack Kerouac, PJ Harvey, Sinéad O’Connor.” The big one for him is Lou Reed, who he even paid homage to in his novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Imperioli has refused to focus his energies on one discipline. He is writing a movie with The Sopranos’ David Chase and a sitcom with Alec Berg (Silicon Valley), and is still considering turning his novel into a movie.
Another big focus for him is Buddhism, which he discovered in 2007. The year The Sopranos finished, I say. “Not a coincidence,” he says instantly. So was he looking for something to fill a void left by the show? “Yeah, it was a couple of things. I spent my twenties just trying to have a career, and when finally it happened, I was married, kids, all that stuff, and had satisfying work. But I was also abusing drugs and alcohol to a point where it felt destructive. But I was always a functional professional, I didn’t miss work.”
So he wasn’t like Christopher Moltisanti, who became a heroin addict on the show and required an intervention?
“No, I wasn’t like that. But it was alarming, the kind of loss of will and control. You kind of get, maybe in your circles, a little swept up.”
When he says drugs, does he mean cocaine? He has the briefest of hesitations, but decides to go for it. “Yeah. At first it’s fun, I guess, but then you realise it’s destructive. I investigated a lot of different spiritual paths, some interesting, some weird. But with Buddhism, it clicked. So did Buddhism take me out of the abusive stuff? Yes, but it was also a desire to find something that regenerates your creativity and the way you engage with the world, whereas drug and alcohol abuse diminishes it.”
My tolerance for actors talking about religion is next to non-existent. But Imperioli talks about it the same way he talks about everything: thoughtfully, openly and persuasively. A person only sounds pretentious if they don’t have authenticity, and Imperioli never lacks that, whatever he’s discussing. By now we’ve been talking for more than two hours and to finish I ask him what his sitcom will be about. It’s about an actor who becomes a Buddhist, he says. “It’s me but not me,” he adds. And I believe him. After all, no single show could contain all of him.
TV’s one-show wonders
Kelsey Grammer, 68
Dr Frasier Crane, Frasier (1993-2004)
The actor’s 20-year stint as the befuddled psychiatrist won him two Golden Globes. There was the political drama Boss and an appearance in X-Men — but this year he will be back in the Frasier reboot.
Matt LeBlanc, 55
Joey Tribbiani, Friends (1994-2004)
LeBlanc will never escape the role of the charming hunk/endearing moron. The spin-off series Joey, a fictionalised version of himself in Episodes, the sitcom Man with a Plan, even his stint as a Top Gear host — it’s all Joey.
Christina Hendricks, 48
Joan Harris, Mad Men (2007-15)
The actress has carried her career-defining character Joan’s no-nonsense spirit into almost every role since — Beth in Good Girls, Trudy in Hap and Leonard, Elizabeth in Tin Star — but who remembers those?
Aaron Paul, 43
Jesse Pinkman, Breaking Bad (2008-13)
Paul will always be defined by his Emmy-winning performance as a wild-eyed crystal meth dealer. He’s still playing variations of the same emotionally damaged character: see Westworld and The Path. He even voices one in the animation BoJack Horseman.
Lena Headey, 49
Cersei Lannister, Game of Thrones (2011-19)
Her speciality? Medieval queen who has an affair and/or betrays her husband. First in Merlin, next in 300, then in the role with which she will for ever be linked: Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister, a queen who sleeps with her twin brother.
- By Jake Helm
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London