'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 feasible. 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 worshipping Scorsese, it was a dream come true.

"It was like being called from the minor leagues, from playing in some tiny little town, up to the World Series," he says.

There are no guarantees in Hollywood, and even though "Goodfellas" seemed like a safe bet, Imperioli wasn't sure if his scenes would wind up on the cutting room floor. They didn't, and as "Goodfellas" became a known commodity — especially once it started making the rounds on cable television — it helped him secure more work, including roles in "Bad Boys," "Dead Presidents," "The Basketball Diaries" and Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction," as well as a working relationship with Spike Lee that spanned six movies. (Imperioli also co-wrote Spike's sweaty 1999 crime thriller "Summer of Sam.")

By the time "The Sopranos" came along, he had already worked with a lot of the actors in the cast in various projects, so it was like reuniting with friends. The show ran from 1999 to 2007, and after it wrapped Imperioli found himself on a series of network cop shows, including the locally shot and set "Detroit 1-8-7."

The show was canceled after one season on ABC and was a victim of being a little bit ahead of its time, Imperioli says.

"That was a show that I thought would have done better if it was on cable or streaming or something, because it really had it all," says Imperioli, who lived in Royal Oak in 2010 and 2011 while the show was being filmed. "It had an audience, but it had a small audience, and network TV doesn't like small audiences because they they have to get high numbers so they can get high advertising rates. With streamers, you can kind of ride a bit more on cult following and stuff like that."

Imperioli kept rolling, working on shows such as "Californication," "Hawaii Five-0" and "Blue Bloods" before finding himself back at the center of another smash hit last year on the second season of HBO's "The White Lotus." For his role as Dominic Di Grasso, a man in crisis while on vacation in Italy with his son (Adam DiMarco) and father (F. Murray Abraham), Imperioli is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, his sixth nomination in the category.

"It was a very unique situation, because you were kind of doing a new show, but it was already a hit," he says of the way "The White Lotus" picked up a new cast and new storylines in its second season. The show dramatically increased his awareness among college and post-college aged females, says Imperioli, who has three children with Victoria Chlebowski, his wife of 27 years.

Imperioli, who regularly practices tae kwon do, credits his acting teacher, the late Elaine Aiken, with schooling him in the craft and teaching him respect for the material. His career — he's appeared in more than 30 TV series and almost 70 films — has taken him around the world, and he's always picking up new experiences that help enrich his life and his work on and off screen.

"I'm very proud of being a part of this tradition," he says. "You know, life is a difficult and stressful and overwhelming, especially nowadays. And if you can provide people with a bit of escapism and joy and fun? That's a good thing."

agraham@detroitnews.com

In Conversation with The Sopranos

8 p.m. Saturday

Andiamo Celebrity Showroom,  7096 E. 14 Mile, Warren

Tickets $35-$99

Ticketmaster.com