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Culture
Since the end of The Sopranos the crown prince of prestige television has been on a trippy ride that's involved making music, award-winning podcasts and the world's best Instagram feed. Now he's back at the centre of TV culture with a role in buzzy drama The White Lotus
By Joel Golby
On 8 July 2020, an already-dormant east London stopped entirely to tune in to Michael Imperioli’s show on local radio station NTS. Sorry to go back there, but I have to set a scene. It was those deep, dark, insane, woozy, infinite days of lockdown, the ‘walking very far apart from each other in parks’ days, post-Dominic Cummings but pre-QR codes in pubs, when it was impossible to buy a coffee or a haircut or see your family, and the news was endless and dreadful and everyone kept trying to organise doomed Zoom dinner parties. And then: “Hello, this is Michael Imperioli on uh, ‘NTS Radio’. Welcome to 632 Elysian Fields. Mr and Mrs K. [Kowalski] have stacked up some wonderful records on their phonograph… and Blanche will be visiting later on. Here’s Charles Mingus.” What followed was an hour of A Streetcar Named Desire-inspired jazz and deep-cut classic rock and shoegaze-inflected indie, purred over by one of the lead actors from the series everyone on planet Earth was presently either watching or rewatching. It was the coolest thing that had happened to this country since about 1997.
“Well that came out of Instagram,” Imperioli tells me, over a Zoom from New York, in front of two exquisite antique vases tastefully balanced on a bureau (his wife is an interior decorator, and their house does NOT look like shit). “I made a post about My Bloody Valentine one day, and it got a lot of attention, that post, and then people who were fans of mine –or my character on The Sopranos – realised that we had similar tastes.” There’s a pattern to the last couple of years of Michael Imperioli’s life: he earnestly forges his own path, which currently involves posting about the things he loves on Instagram (recently: a John Lennon birthday memorial a few blocks away from his place in New York; a Rachel Maddow podcast he enjoyed; select lyrics from the Bowie song “Candidate” alongside a really blown-out screenshot of the cover of Diamond Dogs), and good things flow towards him as a result. His on-again-off-again art-rock band, Zopa, were finally able to release the album they recorded then shelved in 2012, the year Imperioli moved cross-country to LA. A small but dedicated group tuned in to his monthly meditation sessions, and a bigger one for his lockdown project, the half-oral history, half-podcast Talking Sopranos. And now he’s about to star in the second season of the buzziest show of 2021, Mike White’s note-perfect, eat-the-rich satire, The White Lotus.
The thing is, post-Sopranos, you’d expect to see an actor as thoughtful and talented as Imperioli (who played such an iconically troubled character as Christopher Moltisanti) everywhere: TV cameos, SNL hosting gigs, indie movies and blockbuster ones, another legacy TV show minimum, and surely on the outer periphery of the Marvel universe, at least (“I’m not sure about this Iron Man shit, T.”). Instead, he took a more meandering, holistic route: he and his wife opened the off-broadway theatre Studio Dante, where he served as artistic director; he competed in, and won, the competitive cooking show, Chopped, donating his $50,000 prize fund to an organisation that runs rural schools in Tibet. He made a cameo here and there (Uriel in Lucifer; Sensei Billy in The Office), led a single-season, good-but-doomed show or two (Lincoln Rhyme, Detroit 1-8-7), and had a series of production ideas that never came to light (a show about a pimp starring his Sopranos co-star and close friend Steve Schirripa that I desperately need interest to reignite in; a Bad Lieutenant adaption with Tom Hardy attached as EP). He recorded and didn’t release a lot of music, he got all his three kids through college, he did “a lot of independent stuff”.
That “independent stuff” era included bookstore readings from his novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes (the result of yet another endless production project – an HBO-friendly, coming-of-age, New York story that he eventually just wrote up as a book), ambiently accompanied by the two members of his band tapping on a drum or strumming a single chord – and he realised he could use Instagram to get the word out about these gigs. Soon, his feed became unlike anything else: somewhere between an old-school blog and a Pinterest board and the original On The Road scroll, a rolling feed of screenshots of his favourite artists, music he’s listening to, books he’s loving (if you want to look Imperioli-cool this Christmas, order yourself Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga and David Milch’s Life’s Work). He caused headlines in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election when he rewrote The Sopranos universe (via an Instagram caption) to have Chris and Tony out campaigning for Biden (“That was a whole other can of worms,” he smiles, “realising that maybe half of my fanbase were pro-Trump.”), even more when he revealed James Gandolfini was a huge fan of Green Day’s Dookie, led guided meditations via Instagram Live videos, and posted snippets of music from his band, Zopa, that had never been able to find a wider audience before. “We started the band in 2006, and even with me being on a hit show, it’s kind of hard to get people to shows in New York playing a little rock club,” he explains. “Now, when we go to shows – we just did a tour at the end of the summer in the Midwest and Canada, we’re going to be playing Europe in June – there’s a lot of people in their 20s and early 30s, a lot of whom found the band through Instagram. So it’s been really, really cool.”
But it was Talking Sopranos that truly ushered in Imperioli’s second era of cool. Starting as a live show, In Conversation With The Sopranos would see Imperioli tour with co-host Steve Schirripa (who played Bobby Baccalieri) and various other cast members from the show – old behind-the-scenes stories, a Q&A section, a phenomenal queue for the urinals at the interval – performing to 1,500+ sell-out crowds in the US and Australia. Plans were in place for a 16-date UK and Ireland tour and then, you know. Cough, cough. Planes were grounded, plans were cancelled. “Some people were like, you know, you should do that as a podcast. I didn’t see how that could work,” Imperioli tells me (Schirripa confirms this to me over Zoom: “We didn’t know how to do it. I’d never listened to a podcast before. I still haven’t. That’s not a lie. I haven’t listened to my own podcast back.”). From somewhere, the idea emerged to run the show independently as a week-by-week rewatch, which neither actor had done since The Sopranos first aired. And… it sucked. “The first, I would say, six episodes are not good at all,” Imperioli admits (Schirripa: “The first five, I’d say, episodes are rough”). But soon a pattern emerged: both men got into it, they figured out their dynamic, Imperioli the craft-studying intellectual, Schirripa remembering things in real time a little bit too close to the mic. The world started to close in and everyone rewatched the greatest TV show ever made just as the pair were making hour-long director’s commentaries for each and every episode. By May 2021, the show had registered 9 million listeners and won a Webby Award. Suddenly, Imperioli was the face and voice of The Sopranos’ enduring legacy: as one of the show’s leading actors, as the writer of five of its episodes, and as its de facto archivist.
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“It gave me a perspective on how good it was,” he explains about the rewatch, which he hadn’t embarked on since the show aired. “I mean I literally had not seen an episode since 2007. I guess, in the beginning, I needed some distance. And then after Jim passed away, it just became… It was hard. And it just felt right now, you know, with the podcast: OK, I can go back and look.” What he saw there was what we all see – the greatest TV show ever made, a stunning, multi-layered portrait of human condition that just happens to be pushed through the lens of the hyper-masculine world of The Mob; proof that, no matter how powerful you get and how rich you become and how high a captain you become in a gang, your teenage daughter can still get a really annoying boyfriend – but with his younger self in the middle of it all. “I was really blown away by just how well done it was, how thorough and detailed – detailed is the word – how thought into everything was. Specific. The writing was so specific and pointed, the casting, the music, locations, you know. So much care went into the making of that show. There were a couple of episodes early on, though, where I really was cringing at my acting. For the most part, I really liked what I did.”
The same way the audience at Imperioli’s gigs have been getting younger, so have the people trying to cast him. Recently he came off the back of playing the spacily, well-meaning Minister Payne in Chris Estrada’s odd-couple Hulu comedy, This Fool, which he loved. “Chris Estrada, probably 20 years ago he was a teenager with a Walkman watching The Sopranos. Now he’s a showrunner.” As Imperioli ascended into a cosmically-cool Instagram meditator and shoegaze tastemaker and unlikely-but-blockbuster podcaster over lockdown, it seems his casting status finally fell in line with his on-screen ability: nobody can do ‘is trying to disguise a secret very, very badly’, ‘ego has been grazed but is still trying to stand up really straight about it’ and ‘pushing airport sunglasses on over a hangover’ quite like Michael Imperioli. When it came to casting series two of HBO’s intricate luxury-hotel-and-interpersonal-dynamics comedy-drama The White Lotus, Imperioli was first choice for ‘smooth LA producer who has just taken his first tiptoe off the rails’ Dom, the middle tier in a father-father-son group that shows masculinity as it has been shaped by one generation to the next. “You have somebody who’s achieved a lot of success in his career, worked hard for it, and felt that the fulfilment of that would bring him a certain amount of satisfaction or completeness,” he says of his character. “But the reality is that it’s anything but that, and he’s unravelling.”
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It nearly didn’t happen, though: although producers always had him in mind, his first self-tape was… a little like the first six episodes of Talking Sopranos. “They didn’t give the scripts out, so I had two scenes. And I just did the audition without watching the show, I’ll be honest, and my managers looked at it before they sent it in. They said, ‘You need to watch the show.’ I said, ‘Why, did I suck?’ So I watched it, and I remember in the beginning thinking this was going to be this really cynical statement about how everything sucks, rich people suck, rich people are gross, and the world is hopeless. But what Mike [White] managed to bring was humanity, universality to this very rarefied world, which I thought was really quite an accomplishment.” It didn’t hurt, of course, that shooting would involve spending four sun-blessed months in Sicily, with a stacked acting roster that includes F. Murray Abraham, Aubrey Plaza, and Tom Hollander. “What was great about it was being in one place for quite a long time. We were in Taormina for like three months – a very touristy place, very seasonal – but we arrived at the end of February and it was pretty dead up until like Easter. We found our restaurants, found our little daily routines, my wife was out there with me the whole time. The pace of life in Italy: the food! The appreciation of beauty and art and nature and history… Sicily has all that. We were all living and shooting in the same hotel, which was really fun. Taking the stairs to work every day: it’s great.”
“Something really good is going to happen from [The White Lotus], you know?” Steve Schirripa tells me, after our Zoom is interrupted briefly by him answering a flip-phone to a courier bringing him a suitcase full of cash (to pay for, he tells us, his daughter’s birthday party), one of the greatest things I’ve ever watched happen through a computer. “I mean, he’s been working for 30-plus years, he did great work on The Sopranos. But he’s much more than that. They want to put you in a box, that you’re a Mob guy forever. Michael is way more than that. Way, way more than that. He helps a lot of people. Spiritually, he’s got a nice vibe about him. So I’m excited to see what happens for him.” Murmuring on the horizon is a book of Zopa lyrics, an “indie rock concept album”, a pilot in development for HBO with Barry’s Alec Berg, and a second novel. He’s not Christopher Moltisanti anymore: he’s proved that time and time and time again. Now, we get to see what Michael Imperioli can do.
‘The White Lotus’ airs from October 31 on Sky Atlantic and Now TV.
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