A Soprano No More
Michael Imperioli is standing just inside the door of Scarlet, he and his wife’s new bar and restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It’s a quarter century since “The Sopranos” began and nearly 17 years after the game-changing TV series last aired, but it’s hard not to still imagine him as Christopher Moltisanti, his Emmy Award-winning role as Tony Soprano’s murderous, excitable and terminally depressed young relative and potential heir apparent. It’s perhaps a little too easy to fantasize that Imperioli will greet a visitor on this bitter cold winter afternoon with the news that a recent victim already “sleeps with the fishes.”
But no. This is 2024. Moltisanti was long ago, and the actor, writer, director and restaurateur Imperioli has had a prolific career in film and television, most recently portraying Dominic Di Grasso, a sex-addicted Hollywood executive in the second season of “The White Lotus,” which brought him a 2023 Emmy Award nomination. The 57-year-old Imperioli has a voice that is calm, soft, relaxed and restrained as well as a full head of hair that’s far along the road to gray. This season, he is starring on Broadway at Circle in the Square in a new revival of Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama An Enemy of the People.
No matter how much he’s done, he says, sitting in an appropriately scarlet private area of the new restaurant, he continues to be stopped on the street and hailed for his decades-old role.
“Now more than ever,” he says, as the show’s six seasons are back on HBO to commemorate the 25th anniversary. “There’s a whole new audience of ‘Sopranos’ fans. There are young people who weren’t even born or were way too young to see it when it was first on the air who have discovered it. It’s become very beloved to people. It’s one of the best series ever on TV. Not a lot of series find successive generations that become obsessed with it. There are a lot of shows that did really well in their day and nobody really watches anymore.”
Imperioli is especially visible these days as he goes to and from the restaurant, not far from where he and his wife, Victoria, live. It was settling in the Upper West Side, he says, that eventually led to their decision to open a restaurant.
Scarlet was designed and built by Victoria. “She had a bar called Ciel Rouge, which she opened in Chelsea in 1995. We met in ’96 and we kind of ran it together,” he says, explaining how it became “kind of a hangout,” and “a very late-night, decadent kind of club.” After that, the couple worked together on Studio Dante, an Off-Broadway theater, before leaving New York for around eight years. “When we moved back, we moved to this neighborhood, where we had never lived before.” The Imperiolis befriended Jeremy Wladis, who owns a number of restaurants on the Upper West Side, among them Harvest Kitchen, Good Enough to Eat and Fred’s. “He told Victoria he was taking over the little space next to Fred’s and wanted to do something with it. He had seen some of her work and really liked it.” The friends became partners, and the result was Scarlet.
“Victoria had the vision to make it something very elegant, very comfortable, kind of a transportive experience,” Imperioli explains. “It’s of a certain period.” The speakeasy-style spot offers crafted cocktails in a setting Imperioli describes as “inviting and seductive.” Live music is part of the operation. “We have a little stage which has a piano. It’s the kind of place that will be both a neighborhood bar and a destination bar. It was important to us that people in the neighborhood adopt it as one of their hangs. And we get people from out of town and other parts of the city who’ve heard about it and want to check it out.”
Imperioli knew at an early age that he wanted to be an actor. He moved from a New York suburb to Manhattan at age 17 to attend acting school and sought stage work. “It was very hard,” he recalls. “I would look through the ads in the trade papers. They were mostly for Off Broadway plays that didn’t pay anything. NYU films. Occasionally independent movies. Big Equity open calls for Broadway. I did all of that for a while.”
What kept him going in those early days was watching impressive talent in action. “I got to see some really great theater,” he says, naming Al Pacino in American Buffalo and Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich in Death of a Salesman.
“When you’re starting out as an actor you have to have a real delusion of being good,” he says, “because it’s really hard to get started. I didn’t know anybody in the business. I had a résumé full of lies, made-up credits. I always had this delusion that as soon as they see me they’ll know. Once I get in the room. And it doesn’t quite work like that.”
In 1990, he landed a small role in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas as Spider, a low-level Mob helper who is murdered by the character played by Joe Pesci. In 1993, he appeared in an Off Broadway play, Aven’ U Boys, about young Italian-American men in Brooklyn. Frank Rich, then the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called him “compelling” and said he showed “exciting promise.” The Times was prescient.
Thirty-one years after that review, Imperioli finds himself on the big stage. “I’m finally making a debut on Broadway,” he says. (He’s playing in the same theater where he once waited for an autograph from Malkovich.) An Enemy of the People, the 1882 Ibsen play about a whistleblower and his fate, has a new translation by playwright Amy Herzog. The director is Sam Gold, a 2015 Tony Award winner, and it co-stars Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy on “Succession.”
Strong portrays Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who discovers that the water in his Norwegian town’s spa is contaminated. He wants to warn everyone of the danger he foresees. Imperioli is the town’s mayor—Stockmann’s brother Peter—who wants to keep the discovery a secret for the sake of the local economy.
So why did Imperioli want the role? “Ibsen is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare,” he says. “And this play is perhaps more relevant than it’s been since it was written. In the 1950s, Arthur Miller did a famous adaptation of it, through the lens of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. And I think the play is very, very timely now, especially with the debate over climate change and the politicization of it, as well as the issues of the Covid vaccine, and Covid shutting down the economy, or not shutting down the economy, the quarantine, and how the science of that gets debated through a political lens.”
Is Imperioli the villain of the piece? “It could be taken that way, depending on how you see things. As an actor, you don’t play the villain. You play this character who I think really believes that he’s doing the best,” he says. “I don’t see him as a villain. I think that’s the audience’s business.”
While Imperioli, a former cigarette smoker, no longer puffs (he has asthma) he still enjoys the aroma of smoke. “I love the smell of a cigar burning. I’m jealous that I can’t smoke because the idea of enjoying one seems really seductive.”
There’s another scent Imperioli has enjoyed these last decades, one equally seductive. The sweet smell of success.
