Inside the Zen Mind of Michael Imperioli

On a Monday morning in late August, Michael Imperioli sits cross-legged in front of ruby red drapes not unlike theater curtains, about to teach 400 people from all over the world how to breathe. “This is very beautiful, thank you,” he says, after listing the various far-flung places—Indonesia, Italy, Buenos Aires, Brooklyn—from which viewers are tuning in for his inaugural free Meditation 101 class. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with a string of wooden mala prayer beads around his neck, his wavy silver hair and narrow black-rimmed glasses giving him a vaguely professorial air.

“Most of the time we sit and do nothing, we’re distracted,” Imperioli intones to his virtual audience. “With our phones, with social media, with our plans, with our fears, with our thoughts, with our fantasies, with our worries about the future, with our projections about what’s coming next, with our regrets about the past.” Imperioli pauses and allows us to marinate on our regretful, phone-addled reality before offering up an alternative: “Instead of being lost in projection and lost in regret and lost in all these thoughts and distracted by them, what we’re going to do is watch those thoughts and watch the mind and become aware of them.”

“Which brings us to a good question,” he continues. “What is the mind?”

It’s tempting to imagine this as a possible future for Christopher Moltisanti, Imperioli’s character on The Sopranos, if only he had stuck with his journey of sobriety and personal growth. (You can almost hear Paulie Walnuts off to the side: “You listening to this, T? Chrissy says we’re trapped in an endless karmic cycle of suffering.”) This is the very nature of celebrity, for the public to want to associate an actor with their most famous role, an impulse that’s exponentially exaggerated when the actor in question played that role for six seasons on what is widely considered the greatest television series of all time.

In truth, Imperioli has always had little in common with Christopher—excuse me, Christafaaa—the crass, chauvinistic, tragically doomed mob soldier and nephew of crime boss Tony Soprano. Imperioli, now 54, is a Buddhist, a vegetarian, and a happily married father of three who loves shoegaze and the theater. “I found him really fascinating. It was kind of exactly what I wanted to do at the time,” Imperioli says of the character on a video call a few days before his meditation session. The actor is in the same red-curtained studio in his Santa Barbara home, wearing a nearly identical outfit, and he speaks in a manner that is sincere but never self-serious. “Looking back, I feel so far away from him,” he says. “I almost don't even recognize that guy.”

And he has been looking back as of late. In April, Imperioli started the weekly podcast Talking Sopranos with former co-star Steve Schirripa, aka Bobby Bacala, which has them rewatching the series for the first time since it premiered in 1999. Their timing was fortuitous: Talking Sopranos launched during the early days of coronavirus lockdown, when so many people were either revisiting the show or doing an introductory binge, that viewership increased nearly threefold. Since James Gandolfini’s untimely death in 2013, Imperioli is the most prominent cast member engaging with the legacy of a show whose fandom is devout and constantly growing. Which means he can make a throwaway comment on Instagram about how much Gandolfini enjoyed listening to Green Day—specifically, the album Dookie on vinyl—and it’ll result in a three-day-long news cycle about how much James Gandolfini enjoyed listening to Dookie on vinyl.

“The Instagram thing, which I'm new to, it's been very positive because fans get to see different sides of you that they normally wouldn't have exposure to,” Imperioli tells me. “There's something really special about being able to communicate to people without the filter of PR.” Someone might land on his page because of the show, but soon learn about his alt-rock band Zopa, which released their first EP in July. Or his Buddhism practice, which Imperioli says led to so many DMs asking him how to meditate that he figured he would try to teach it en masse. Mostly, he uses the platform to earnestly share blurry photos of his various artistic enthusiasms, from Mary Gaitskill to Ralph Ellison, My Bloody Valentine to Lou Barlow, Pier Paolo Pasolini to Kevin Corrigan.

When it comes to posting about his political leanings, some fans find the divergence between Christopher and Michael more jarring. “I never was aware until Instagram and the podcast that maybe a majority of Sopranos fans are Republican, conservative Trump people,” he says. “I grew up around struggling artists and liberals and lefties, and that's where I've been politically my whole life. I respect anybody's politics … but I felt it was important that people know who I am.” 

One of his bits involves posting photos of famous Italian Americans who should be honored with statues in place of Christopher Columbus: sixties crooner Dion, for instance, or Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls. Writing that Columbus “enslaved and caused the death of many indigenous people,” as Imperioli has done, tends to piss off his conservative fans. “To be blunt, it’s not that huge of a deal to me, but it is to some people and I understand why and I support that,” he says. “Yeah, let's get rid of it. Let’s keep the day of pride, let's keep a parade for Italians. We’ve certainly contributed enough. But let's do it with someone who really means something to us.”

“I mean, most Italians, they don't really give a shit about Columbus,” he adds.

It can be a little surreal to watch the actor engage with his audience so gamely. It feels like Imperioli’s prestige TV cachet and ferocious talent could have led to a different trajectory, one with big budgets and high-profile projects. The reality is much more idiosyncratic, a DIY path cobbled together from various esoteric passions. There are the mainstream movies and TV shows that pay the bills, sure. Imperioli has amassed a disproportionate amount of detective roles on his resume, from The Lovely Bones to Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector. (It was at the former project’s Royal premiere where he came across an unexpected admirer of his work: “Prince Charles was a fan of The Sopranos.”) There is, in a sublime category all its own, a Chopped Tournament of Stars victory from 2014, where he wears a ponytail with a bandana and mixes ice cream with his hands. Then there is the stuff that provides a direct, accessible line to his true sensibilities: indies and fiction writing and music and theater and, now, even these Zoom meditation classes.

“I don't get a lot of opportunities,” he laughs, more matter-of-factly than aggrieved. “That’s why I'm always generating my own stuff. It's not like I have Hollywood ringing my phone all the freaking time. I've worked consistently, luckily, but it's not like all the top directors are calling me and want me in their stuff. It still always feels like a battle, kind of.”

Long before he became one of the most famous guys to ever don a tracksuit, Imperioli was a kid from Mount Vernon, New York, who decided to blow up his life.

Mom was a secretary at a public school; Dad was a bus driver who dabbled in community theater. (Imperioli himself did not learn how to drive until he was cast on The Sopranos). The night before he was set to leave for college upstate (pre-med), he panicked and told them he couldn’t do it. What he really wanted was to act, and so he moved to the city to attend the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. It was there, at 17, that he met lifelong friend John Ventimiglia, who would go on to play Artie Bucco alongside him on The Sopranos. “My first impression of Michael was that he had the greatest hair I’d ever seen,” Ventimiglia told me. “And he had this sensitivity and intelligence that was profound.”

I mean, most Italians, they don't really give a shit about Columbus.

The pair became roommates in the East Village of the ‘80s. “Michael, I don’t think, was ever doing anything to get rich, get famous,” says Ventimiglia. It was during that time that Imperioli began to come into his own: reading Jack Kerouac, going vegetarian because of The Smiths's Meat Is Murder, inhaling every John Cassavetes film he could get to. “Cassavetes changed my life,” says Imperioli emphatically.

The acting wasn’t quite as fruitful. In his early twenties, he got fired from his first big play after opening weekend for refusing to work with the director. “I didn't respect him very much,” Imperioli says, because—irony of ironies—“he came from TV.” The first time a film camera turned on him, for the movie Lean on Me with Morgan Freeman, he flubbed his sole line so badly that it was cut. His fortunes started to change when he nabbed a little part in a little movie called GoodFellas, playing a hanger-on called Spider who meets his end on the wrong side of Joe Pesci’s gun. “That was like going from college ball to playing in the world series with the Yankees,” Imperioli says. “But, even after that movie came out, I was still working in restaurants.” It did directly lead to more opportunities with Martin Scorsese pal Spike Lee, including Imperioli’s first writing credit on the screenplay for Summer of Sam.

The news that Imperioli was releasing his first novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes, a couple of years ago may have come as a surprise to some—or at least conjured up images of Christopher typing “I must be loyle to my capo”—but he’s been a writer for about as long as he’s been an actor. Problem was, he could never bring himself to actually finish anything. “When I turned 30, I had a stack literally of notebooks and scripts and shit. I would move every year in New York from apartment to apartment and I'd carry all this stuff with me,” says Imperioli. “Finally, I was like, ‘You're in love with the idea of being a writer, but you don't really have anything to say.’

“I took that whole stack of shit and threw it in the garbage,” he adds. “And somehow that unlocked some weird thing in me.”

And, who knows, maybe that unlocked something else: It was around that time that he was cast in the pilot for The Sopranos. You know that next part by now.

Then, as The Sopranos was winding down, Imperioli found himself plagued by a feeling that something was missing. He had ascended to a place that had taken him years to reach, looked around at the view, and thought: That’s it? “I had a lot of great, positive stuff,” he says. “I had a great family and kids and friends and great work, satisfying work—but there's a spiritual component to us as human beings and it needed addressing.” This dissatisfaction led to a period of soul-searching, including some experimentation with mysticism and the occult, that eventually led him and his wife Victoria to their first Buddhist teacher. (In classic New York fashion, his center was housed in what was formerly a “decadent, insane” Tribeca after-hours club the pair had frequented in the ‘80s.)

He also decided to “go back to the drawing board” with his work. Started a no-wave post-punk band with a couple of friends and an off-Broadway theater called Studio Dante. “Boom!” he says, still retaining a degree of that familiar, no-bullshit candor bred in the tri-state area. “I'm back to my roots again and happy as a pig in shit. And I didn’t even need to work in restaurants to support myself.”

These days, when he’s not arguing with right-wingers in his comments or guiding others towards inner peace, Imperioli is mainly preoccupied with pitching a film adaptation of The Perfume Burned His Eyes. A coming-of-age story set in ‘70s New York, his novel follows a teenage boy named Matthew who makes the acquaintance of Lou Reed, then living on the Upper East Side with his transgender girlfriend Rachel Humphreys. It’s a punchy and raw debut, highly evocative of its time and place. I wonder who Imperioli has in mind to play Reed, with whom he became friends later in the musician’s life. 

“Me!” he responds instantly. “I’m playing Lou!” After nearly a decade out in California, he and his wife are about to become empty nesters—their youngest is heading off to music school—and so they’re packing it in and returning to New York City for good in the fall. Imperioli hopes to film the movie there next summer. He’s also working on a new novel and two television treatments, but demurs when asked to reveal anything more.

The smaller, self-generated projects suit him just fine. “I think the danger would have been this: when you're on a hit, now the next thing has to be a hit, a bigger hit, a bigger part, the leading part, more money,” he says. “If you get into that, that's where you're dead, because that might not happen ... If you've built your lifestyle up to a point where you got to maintain some million dollar income a year, you're kind of fucked. Because you may not. And then you're going to be disappointed and you're going to feel like you're a failure.”

As Imperioli’s meditation class nears its end after an hour, the chat window populates with appreciative comments. “This was beautiful and so loving,” one person writes. “Michael, you are amazing. Thank you for opening paths,” someone else adds. “This was amazing, but can’t help myself,” another person writes, before semi-apologetically (and semi-correctly) quoting Christopher: “‘In my mind I use the method of positive visualization.’”

I get the sense that Imperioli would not entertain the idea that he peaked with The Sopranos—that the very suggestion would be at odds with his entire worldview. I can also glean it from the way he talks about Cabaret Maxime, an under-the-radar indie released in the U.S. earlier this year. He stars as the owner of a burlesque club in an unnamed European city, a clear homage to Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (his character’s name, Bennie Gaza, is even a few letters off from the 1976 film’s star Ben Gazzara). The place is about as far away from Bada Bing! as you can get. The dancers aren’t taut, silicon-pumped bottle blondes, but rather are aging, cellulite-dappled, and devoted to their craft. He’s being strong-armed to sell the cabaret so that it can compete with the newer and shinier clubs cropping up in the district, but he refuses to give up on the poetry of the place. Imperioli thinks that it’s his best performance yet, and that he’s become a much better actor in the last five years.

What happened in the last five years? Well, Imperioli thinks of this old acting teacher he had at the Strasberg Institute, back when he was first starting out. This teacher used to say that after 20 years, even a bad actor would be capable of relaxing on stage. This, as you might imagine, did not sit well with a kid who was eager to break out—but he gets it now. “I didn't know what he was saying,” Imperioli says. “20 years?! I want to start working now, what are you talking about? And part of it’s that I’ve accepted that maybe I do know a few things.”

Which brings us back to that good question he posed during meditation class: What is the mind?

“An absolutely clear blue sky,” Imperioli says. “With not a cloud in it.”

Steve Buscemi has seen it all. He was hit by a car and a bus as a kid, was once stabbed in a bar fight, volunteered as a firefighter during 9/11, and somewhere along the way became one of the most accomplished film actors of his generation. And then tragedy struck: In 2019, Buscemi lost his wife of over 30 years. In a rare interview, Hollywood's most beloved misfit opens up about anxiety, loss, and the hard work of getting through it all.

Originally Appeared on GQ