Actor Michael Imperioli leading Zopa to Woodstock Film Festival performance

Michael Imperioli was in one of last year’s hottest shows, playing a father on a high-wire vacation with his son and dad on HBO’s “The White Lotus.”

Imperioli has been a fixture on the screen since his youth through roles in projects like “Goodfellas,” “The Sopranos,” and “Escape At Dannemora.”

But in recent years, another side of Imperioli’s artistry has emerged, including the publication of his novel “The Perfume Burned His Eyes,” and releases from his rock group Zopa.

The band will be performing as part of the Woodstock Film Festival on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Tinker Street Cinema.

I think a lot of people know your work on the screen. But you’ve been doing music for quite a while. How did you get started in that vein?

I started playing in a band when I was 19, certainly after I started studying acting in New York, and you know, in the early 80s, in New York, there was a lot of cross-pollination between actors and writers and musicians, filmmakers , poets, on the Lower East side of New York, especially, it was kind of a ground zero for that melting pot. Performance art as well, which kind of, I think came out of like punk rock meets experimental theater. So I started playing in bands back then. Played in a couple of bands in the 80s and 90s. And then in 2006, we formed Zopa. And we were playing a lot of shows in New York with a little bit of touring in the U.S. and Europe between 2006 and 2013. And then I moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. for a number of years, and we were not active until I moved back to New York in 2021. Since then, we’ve been quite busy writing and recording and playing shows. And that’s basically the story.

Did you guys pick it right back up then break?

I published the novel, as you mentioned, in 2018. And I started doing some spoken word events, mostly with Lydia Lunch, who does this verbal burlesque spoken word tour, and I did a bunch of those with her and would have either Elijah, who plays bass in Zopa or Olmo, who plays the drums, accompanying me when I did live readings of the book. And that was kind of the beginning. That was 2019 and 2020. We started working together a bit. And then in 2021 we started practicing again, and it was still the pandemic. So the first thing we did was a virtual benefit for the Coney Island Museum. And then since then, we’ve been we’ve been really busy.

I don’t know how it’s impacted you but have you had more time to do music because of the actors’ strike that’s still going on as we speak?

I make time. I’m pretty good at budgeting time doing different things. I’m someone who really has to remain creative, even when they’re not, like, officially hired for a job like an acting job or something. So unless I’m on location shooting like I was in last year for the ‘White Lotus,’ when I’m in New York we practice regularly together and do shows. We do a lot of shows in New York, but we’ve done quite a few tours in the last couple of years that have been coming up in the fall, in November.

Do you get something different as a performer from your musical side than you do from your acting side?

Yes and no. In some ways, they’re very similar. Live performance I find very similar to live performance of like, theater, you know, you’re trying to connect to it, honestly, to a certain emotion, that’s part of the story and communicating to an audience. I just love music, you know, and love collaborating, especially with other musicians, especially Olmo and Elijah, and creating music and making that sound and, you know, being with two other musicians for quite a long time, our sound has changed over the years and in really great ways and developed in specific ways. And then the satisfaction of having a band that is very much a band and a very equal collaboration of musicians, not just like a singer-songwriter with a rhythm section or something like that. It’s definitely a cohesive thing, developing that over time and that kind of level of communication is really special.