Michael Imperioli Can Keep a Secret

This interview includes spoilers for the second season of The White Lotus.

Michael Imperioli leans across the booth at Cafe Fiorello on the Upper West Side, his thick eyebrow raised, the pupils in his hazel eyes narrowed. “I’m very good at keeping secrets,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “You could tell me the worst thing you've ever done in your life, something that you're afraid people will hate you for and I'll never ever tell. Go ahead!”

I laugh nervously and try to turn the conversation back to him. We are two weeks out from the finale of The White Lotus and Imperioli will absolutely not budge, no matter how I try to coax him, into giving me a clue about who ends up dead in the final episode. He’s been here before. He was privy to the end of the most talked-about, most polarizing finale in television history: The Sopranos. The HBO show that made Imperioli a star treated the last episode in 2007 as a state secret: They stopped having full read-throughs, stopped giving scripts to guest stars. Though his character Christopher Moltisani died a few episodes before the finale, producer David Chase told the actor how it would all end, that it would just cut to black. And the actor did not tell a soul.

“I don’t get why people want to know—why they want to have you spoil the whole thing,” he says with a shrug. So instead, Imperioli and I spoke again on the phone late last night, moments after his character Dominic Di Grasso boards the plane back to the states with his father (F. Murray Abraham) and son, Albie (Adam DiMarco), surviving the deadly checkout day.

In the finale, Imperioli’s character, a Hollywood big wig with a sex addiction, managed to broker a deal with his son—paying off the sex worker they both slept with in exchange for Albie putting in a good word with his mother, on whom Dom has been compulsively cheating.

“It's a ridiculously happy ending,” Imperioli tells me with a laugh on our call. “Like, I paid 50 grand so my son could help this hooker that we both slept with and he kind of smooths things over with his mom—my wife—and we love each other now and everything's OK. Compared to what happens with Tanya, it's very subtle, but it's very twisted, actually.”

But is Dom changed? After a hopeful phone call with Dominic’s wife, there’s a moment near the very end of the show where a beautiful young Italian woman walks by, turning the heads of each of the Di Grasso men as they prepare to fly home.

“I do think Dominic has changed. But at the same time, I think what [writer and director] Mike [White] is saying is that you can't deny sexual attraction, but that doesn't mean you have to act on it all the time. And sexual attraction is not necessarily a bad thing,” Imperioli says. “It's easy to write people off as one thing, and nobody's one thing. We're all very complicated and very complex. Dominic's a character who was unfaithful … but I think he does love his wife and wants to be with her. You can judge it on moral grounds very easily, as bad, as wrong, as this and that, and yet, it is what it is. And at the end of the show, he's gonna go back and have a shot at mending some really deep wounds and damage. And there's hope. Mike finds hope where you didn't think you'd find much.”

In fact, when I spoke to White days before the finale, he said, “Who knows, maybe there’ll be another White Lotus season where Dominic comes with his wife and they patch it all up!”

The return of Imperioli—like that of actress Jennifer Coolidge who returned after Season One of the show—would be a fitting second chapter for the actor who is riding his second wave of television stardom. He never went away after The Sopranos, but he hadn’t had another smash hit like that until now. On our call, I tell him what White said—about his idea about Dom’s return. He’s quiet for a beat.

“I don't want to think about it too much,” he says. You can almost hear him shaking his head through the phone. “Because the idea of that makes me so happy. I don't want to be disappointed…I would want nothing more than that. I just loved working with Mike so much.”

Imperioli is talking about the finale based on his memories of filming and reading the script—he didn’t watch it last night because he doesn’t watch himself on screen. After all these years, Imperioli still gets overwhelming anxiety before filming and can’t stand to watch his projects until long after they air. “I tend to take a while before I look at stuff that I do know, like maybe a long time,” he says. “It’s not so productive for me to examine what I did and what I didn't do.”

Back to lunch, the one a couple of weeks before the finale, in the front of the old-school Italian restaurant across from Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, a few blocks from his apartment. Imperioli suggests the antipasto bar, explaining that he’s a longtime vegetarian and it’s what he always gets here. He unzips his black jacket, revealing a T-shirt and a couple of beaded necklaces. He has a calm, peaceful air about him—much different than the tortured, tightly wound characters he often plays on screen.

“I’ve played so many addicts,” he says. “I like it because the stakes are very high. For an actor, it’s a great conflict because you're in conflict with yourself which allows a whole level of introspection. It’s an internal battle. I find it really interesting.”

As he closes his menu, he tells me how good it is to be back here in the city. Until recently, he and his wife of 26 years, Victoria, lived in California. It was good to have space for the kids; Victoria had a 5-year-old daughter when they got together and then together they had two boys. But now, they’re back on the Upper West Side, a few blocks from where his mother’s father was born. The kids are all out of the house, and the pair is enjoying being empty nesters—the first time in their relationship without kids around.

Imperioli hasn’t stopped working since The Sopranos wrapped 16 years ago. He’s had parts in well-reviewed projects like Watchmen, Escape at Dannemora, and Californication—and dozens of other shows you haven’t heard of. “There were times where I felt I got into some slumps, where I wasn't doing what I wanted to do,” he says. “Part of that was raising a family and wanting to earn a certain amount of money every year.”

More recently, he and his Sopranos co-star Steve Schirripa hosted the popular podcast Talking Sopranos, which revisited each episode of the show, and they wrote the book Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos. Imperioli was in his early 30s when he was cast as Christopher Moltisani, the pugnacious nephew figure to mafia boss Tony Soprano; the actor is 56 now and his signature coiffed hair is silver, but he is recognized for that role more than ever thanks to a new generation discovering the show during Covid lockdowns. A couple of weeks ago, he was walking down the stairs at the Houston Street subway station in Manhattan when a young guy, maybe late 20s, caught his eye. There’s a particular type of heightened energy that comes when he’s recognized—and Imperioli knew he was recognized. The guy rushed over and pulled up his shirtsleeve, suddenly Imperioli was staring at his own face tattooed on the young man’s arm. And just a couple days ago, he was driving down Broadway when he saw another guy with a Christopher T-shirt walking down the street.

“I'm enjoying being old,” he says with a bemused smile. “I’ve been around for a long time, and people have been watching this stuff for many years and there are young people just discovering stuff. And yeah, it's kind of cool. I hope it leads to more work like this—good projects like White Lotus.”

White Lotus is the first show that Imperioli has been on since The Sopranos that has rivaled the passionate fandom of that show. “I have to say I'm really amazed at how popular it is,” he says, as if this is surprising, as if White Lotus hasn’t completely taken over my social media and group chats over the last month. “I mean, it is really, really popular. I've done a lot of television since The Sopranos and nothing has come close to this kind of level of excitement. People are really, really into it.”

For Season Two of the HBO show, the cast spent four months filming in Sicily in Italy’s off season. They became close—particularly Imperioli and his on-screen dad, F. Murray Abraham.

“Usually on the set, actors hang out in their trailer or prepare themselves; I go right to the set. I don't mess around. I'm ready to go. I'm usually the first one there,” Abraham tells me. “But not this time; Michael was always there. We have a lot of respect for the work. I guess that's part of it. But also I trust him and he's a man to be trusted. I wish that it didn't sound just like I'm gushing, but I don't say this about many people. And it's a pleasure to be able to say it.”

As soon as Imperioli was cast on the show, he called Abraham and invited him out to lunch in New York, where they both live, to talk about their roles. Imperioli reminded the veteran theater actor that 30 years ago they did a reading for a play in which they had father-and-son roles. But White Lotus is their first series together and they’re pitch perfect together.

The Di Grasso storyline was inspired by show creator Mike White’s own trip with his father to Sweden, where their family is from. He knew, having seen The Sopranos, that he wanted Imperioli for the role of Dom. “This guy is, on the page, not likable,” White says of the character. “I needed to find someone who is a great actor and grounded, credible, and honest, and, at the same time, likable to men and to women, who is somebody that you're gonna want to be in his company, even though you know these things about him. And Michael is just somebody who has a likability and a relatability that I think helped make Dominic a palatable persona.”

Imperioli hadn’t seen the first season of White Lotus, which was an instant sensation in 2021—until his manager insisted he binge it after seeing the actor’s first attempt at his audition tape. Imperioli loved it, and understood that particular balance of drama and comedy that defines White’s work. And he tried to draw from his own experience as a father and a son, the roles most central to his character on the series.

“In life and on the show, no matter how you slice it, there's always a generation gap,” he says. “My middle child is my oldest son and we actually have a lot in common. We just went to the movies together the other night—we have a lot of the same taste in movies and music and even like political, social issues. But still, there's a generation gap and that's always going to be part of the equation. Even if you might be kind of hip and cool to their friends, there's always gonna be that element.”

Imperioli’s favorite scene to shoot in the finale was with his on-screen son, as the younger character asks his father for €50,000. Albie thinks Lucia is being stalked by a dangerous pimp and that his father’s money will help her—so that they can maybe even eventually have a relationship. When his father doesn’t give over the money right away, Albie says if he does, he’ll put in a good word with his mother. The two actors practiced the scene over and over to get it just right.

“I think there's something in his son's ruthlessness that makes him happy because I think he was worried about his son being too soft and too naive and too spoiled and sheltered. We want our kids to have good survival skills, and somehow that shrewdness that he shows in that scene gives him a little bit of pride in a weird way that OK, well, maybe this kid's not as soft as I thought, even though he's kind of being taken by this woman,” says Imperioli, who believes the Lucia character was playing Albie all along. “And, of course, Albie was going to help smooth that marriage over which, at some point on this trip, Dominic realized was what he wanted.”

Before packing up with his wife, who joined him for the shoot, Imperioli was wracked with the anxiety that overwhelms him before every new project—still, after all this time. “Every single job there's this moment where I'm like, I don't know what it is I'm doing. How am I going to play this guy?,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “Maybe it's good because it keeps you honest and keeps you from phoning it in because you still have a drive to be good.”

To calm his own nerves, he invited Abraham and DiMarco for weekly rehearsals once they got to Sicily. Haley Lu Richardson, who plays Portia, Albie’s first love interest on the show, joined, as did Italian actors Sabrina Impacciatore (Valentina), Beatrice Grannò (Mia), and Simona Tabasco (Lucia). The practices helped and the cast became close—particularly Imperioli and Abraham, who often went out to dinner with Imperioli and his wife during filming. They’ve all remained close since returning to the city, too. “He’s become one of my closest friends—and that doesn’t often happen when I’m working,” Imperioli says. About Imperioli, Abraham adds, “As far as I'm concerned, it’s a lifelong friendship. Finding a friend like that is just plain good luck. And when you do make a new friend, it's a gift.”

When Imperioli and I spoke in November, he was preparing to go the next day to the funeral for Abraham’s wife of 60 years who died earlier that month. A week after the funeral, Abraham was front-row at a book signing for Imperioli at The Strand bookstore in Manhattan, for the paperback release of his novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes.

The novel is one thing on a long list of Imperioli’s other creative pursuits. As Imperioli tells it, he hasn’t waited for work to come to him in the days since The Sopranos—he’s made work for himself. In addition to his novel, he is in the indie rock band Zopa. They’re preparing to go on tour—the only thing that makes him more nervous than starting a new TV series is going on stage. “Oh, it’s much worse,” he says, “because there's an audience. At least with a TV show, it's like you can fuck up and cut and redo it; people have not paid to watch you. I get really nervous going on stage, but at the same time, it's really, really satisfying, really meaningful.”

He’s also writing a new series with Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm writer Alec Berg for HBO—they just got back notes on their second draft and he hopes the momentum of White Lotus will help move it along. The series is loosely based on his own life as an actor and a Buddhist, and if all goes according to plan, Imperioli will play himself. Anyone who ventured over to Imperioli’s Instagram page after a pandemic Sopranos binge noticed his weekly meditation videos. He started doing them in the depths of the lockdowns, when his social media followers reached out with questions about Buddhism. He thought he’d do them for a couple of weeks, but it’s been two and a half years now and his audience continues to grow.

Imperioli, who grew up Catholic, began practicing Buddhism in 2007. “I had everything, everything was great, but something wasn't right. There was an emptiness,” he says, adding that he had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and “other things.” He and his wife, Victoria, explored different spiritual paths before landing on Buddhism. “I feel very fortunate that I fell into it. I think if I didn’t, it would have been very dangerous. I don’t know if I’d still be here.”

As we talk about Buddhism, I ask Imperioli about the bracelet he’s wearing. It’s a blue rubber ring with white lettering all the way around and he’s been pushing it up and down his left wrist throughout our conversation. “Ah,” he says, leaning forward in his seat, excited I noticed it. “My teacher gave me this. This is something called the waterfall sutra. Anybody who sees it, it clears away their negative karma. Liberation by touch. It’s embossed on the inside, here look,” he says, taking it off. “And now you’ve seen it. Here, keep it.” He pushes the bracelet onto my hand.

“2007…” I say. The year he started practicing Buddhism was the year The Sopranos ended, I point out.

The check for our lunch comes and he starts to gather his things and slide out of the booth. “That’s right,” he says with a smile. “No coincidence.”

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