‘Sopranos’ Emmy winner Michael Imperioli: Hit show ‘always had a Rat Pack feeling to it’

Michael Imperioli was 23 when he landed a small part in “Goodfellas,” and if it never got that good again, it probably would have been good enough.

But a decade later he was cast in the role of a lifetime in “The Sopranos” in which he starred as Christopher Moltisanti, dutiful nephew of crime boss Tony Soprano. It nabbed him five Emmy nominations and one win for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, and it was a role he was able to live inside for the entirety of the show’s six-season run.
Sure, people still call out to him as Spider from “Goodfellas,” who gets memorably wacked by Joe Pesci’s character over a simple drink order miscommunication. But with “The Sopranos” he was minted for life, and as new generations are still discovering the HBO series, they have the ink to prove it.
“I was shooting something in Central Park and these tourists from Scotland, it was a 19-year-old guy and his father, and the kid comes up to me and shows me a tattoo of Christopher on his leg,” Imperioli says, recalling a 2019 run-in with a fan. “I was like, ‘what the hell?’ And he was like, ‘I’m a big fan of the show and I just started watching it,’ and that was the beginning of my awareness that there’s a younger audience that had fallen in love with ‘The Sopranos.'”

Audiences of all ages will greet Imperioli, along with his “Sopranos” costars Steve Schirripa and Vincent Pastore, during “In Conversation with The Sopranos” Saturday night at Warren’s Andiamo Celebrity Showroom. The actors will share stories about the show and participate in a Q&A with fans, who may or may not have tattoos of Christopher Moltisanti on their extremities.

Imperioli has been doing a version of the “Sopranos” chat with Schirripa — his co-host on the “Talking Sopranos” podcast — and Pastore for years.

“We actually started doing something like this while the show was still on the air, mostly in casinos, with pretty much all the major actors,” says Imperioli, on the phone earlier this week from his home in New York. “‘The Sopranos ‘ always had a Rat Pack feeling to it, so whenever we did anything where we got together, people would come out for it. And the demand for that continued after the series was off the air and has just grown over the years, with fans wanting to hear about what it was like behind the scenes and hearing about our experiences.”
Imperioli grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, just north of the Bronx, and he fell in love with movies at an early age. He was raised on a steady diet of Scorsese and other gritty films of the ’70s, and he remembers his father taking him to see “Apocalypse Now” in 1979 when he was 13 years old. Formative stuff.
Even though he was intrigued by movies, the path toward getting involved in the business remained elusive.

“I never really thought as a kid that acting was a career you could choose. It was very mysterious,” says Imperioli, 57. “I was like, ‘How do you become an actor?’ It just didn’t seem like anything possible. In high school, it wasn’t like there was a career day where you had the option of talking to an actor.”

In high school he started reading a lot of plays, and he thought becoming a playwright might be his path, but he kept his dreams of being an actor to himself. “In high school, there’s that pressure to not stand out,” he says.

Soon after graduation, however, he found an acting class in New York City and enrolled, and he was the youngest person in a group of students spanning from their 20s to their 50s. “It was really uncharted territory,” he says.

He found his way through it, and scored his first role in the 1988 movie “Alexa,” paying the bills with restaurant work while going out for acting auditions on the side. Roles in “Lean on Me” and “Jacob’s Ladder” followed, until he found himself working with Martin Scorsese on “Goodfellas,” acting alongside Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta.

For an Italian American actor, the role was a huge deal. For an Italian American actor who grew up worshiping Scorsese, it was a dream come true.