‘A gangster offered to teach me how to kill’

Imperioli’s new show seems like the kind of show Tony Soprano would enjoy watching, I tell him. “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “He was a history buff, Tony Soprano.” Imperioli thinks that if Soprano were real, he would have enjoyed learning more about pre-Rico history, when “the code of omertà was much more adhered to.”

Soprano, of course, was played with aplomb by the late James Gandolfini, and his character served as a mentor to his cousin, Christopher Moltisanti, played by Imperioli. In reality, there were only five years between the actors’ ages, and Imperioli says they were “much more friends on the same level.”

Gandolfini’s sense of humor helped. On his first day of filming The Sopranos, Imperioli had to drive backwards at high speed across a tree-lined sidewalk, dodging extras playing pedestrians. The only problem was that he couldn’t drive—and he told no one. Inevitably, he crashed. “I thought they were going to fire me, but they just brought me a new car,” he says. “Jim hated it and was laughing like crazy.”

A common criticism of The Sopranos and other dramas like it is that it glamorizes rather unkind behavior, but Imperioli is unapologetic about that. “Glorify is a strange word. It definitely entertains people,” he says. “The Sopranos is a very entertaining show, but the violence and the tragedy live side by side with the entertaining qualities, the funny sides of it or the sexier sides of it.” He adds: “I can’t imagine anyone who watches the show wanting to live that kind of lifestyle, because a lot of the characters, their lives were cut short, they met a violent end, they had violent lives, they were unhappy, they abused drugs, they had broken marriages, they were murdered, they were mutilated, all those kinds of things.”

He stays in touch with his Sopranos co-stars, but doesn’t jam with Steve Van Zandt, who played Silvio Dante and is a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. “It’s a different genre of music, very different,” Imperioli says, a little shyly. “We’re much more indie-alternative rock.” Imperioli and his Zopa bandmates are gearing up for a series of live shows and will release an album next year.

Though his most famous roles have been in mob dramas, Imperioli has won praise in recent years for broadening his reach. He was nominated for an Emmy—his first since The Sopranos ended—for his role as sex-crazed Hollywood producer Dominic Di Grasso in The White Lotus. Like Di Grasso, who is trying to reconnect with his Italian family, Imperioli first visited his family in Rome when he was 25 and has returned regularly. “They have an affinity for the family that goes to America. When we come back and say, ‘Hi,’ it’s cool.”