Michael Imperioli Shares His Thoughts on The Sopranos' Controversial Ending

HBO's mob drama The Sopranos is one of the most influential shows ever made, and arguably represented the birth of TV's "golden era," becoming the first cable show ever nominated for a drama Emmy in 1999. Along with its many, many accolades, the show also ended with one of the most controversial finales of all time, thanks to its infamously ambiguous final shot.

The show wrapped up with James Gandolfini's conflicted mob boss, Tony Soprano, waiting for his family at an ice cream shop as Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" plays. He's clearly on edge, for good reason, and just as a bell rings to mark the diner's door opening, the scene abruptly cuts to black, leaving Tony's fate unresolved.

In a new interview with HBO Max's Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? (via Entertainment Weekly), Michael Imperioli, who starred in all six seasons of the show as Tony's protégé Christopher Moltisanti, opened up about how he felt about the much-debated ending.

"I've gone back and forth," he said. "And then I thought maybe it's just what you see is what you get. That's the end of the story. There's no dying, there's no what if, there's no what happened to Tony, it's just ends right there. I don't know."

Imperioli, who is heading back to HBO this week in the second season of The White Lotus, went on to admit that he still gets asked about the "mysterious" ending all the time—which is no surprise, since The Sopranos has reportedly enjoyed a resurgence over the past few years. Thousands of viewers belatedly caught up on the show during COVID-19 lockdowns, and in the run-up to the prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, which came out last fall.

After refusing to offer any firm answers for more than a decade, creator David Chase finally gave away his own take on the ending in an interview three years back, during which he referred to the final sequence as a "death scene." The original plan, Chase said, was for Tony to be called to a meeting in Manhattan, "and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting." Though the version that ended up on screen was different, Tony's implied fate is the same.

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