User:CaptainTeebs/sandboxImperioli

Michael Imperioli (born March 26, 1966) is an American actor, writer, and musician. He is best known for his role as Christopher Moltisanti in the HBO crime drama The Sopranos (1999–2007), which earned him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2004. He gained recognition in the early part of his career for his role as Spider in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). He has had supporting roles in films such as Jungle Fever (1991), Bad Boys (1995), The Basketball Diaries (1995), Shark Tale (2004) and The Lovely Bones (2009), as well as in the HBO drama series The White Lotus (2022-present).

Imperioli is a successful screenwriter, co-writing the screenplay for Summer of Sam (1999) with Spike Lee, writing five episodes of The Sopranos, and writing as well as directing the feature film The Hungry Ghosts (2008).

Early life
Imperioli was born in Mount Vernon, New York, a working class suburb of New York City. He is the son of Dan Imperioli, a bus driver and amateur actor, and Claire Imperioli, a department store worker and amateur actress. His ancestors immigrated to the New York from Italy in the 1890s. At age 11, Imperioli and his family moved to Brewster, New York, and in high school began watching Broadway plays. After graduating from Brewster High School in 1983, Imperioli planned on studying pre-med at the State University of New York at Albany. The night before he was set to begin college he confided in his parents of his desire to be an actor. At age 17, Imperioli would move to Manhattan's East Village enrolling at Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute to study acting. While at Lee Strasberg, he met John Ventimiglia who would portray Artie Bucco on The Sopranos, and the two would become roommates.

Early career (1984–1999)
Following his graduation from acting school, Imperioli would be unable to land a role for five years, supporting himself by working as a waiter. He made his film debut in the 1989 film Alexa. In the same year he would have a non speaking role in Lean on Me. In 1990 Imperioli would get his big break portraying Spider; a hanger-on who meets his end on the wrong side of Joe Pesci’s gun in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Imperioli would later describe the role as “going from college ball to playing in the world series with the Yankees.” Imperioli would only appear in the film for a few minutes but his performance was memorable, with Scorsese stating "You just can't forget the kid," Despite the success of Goodfellas, Imperioli still struggled to find work and briefly returned to working in restaurants.

Imperioli's role in Goodfellas would gain the attention of director Spike Lee who would cast Imperioli in minor Italian-American roles in Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Clockers, Girl 6 and would later employ Imperioli as a screenwriter in his 1999 film Summer of Sam. In 1995 Imperioli would appear in a supporting role in The Basketball Diaries as a Bobby, a cancer patient and friend of Johnny portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. In 1999 Imperioli would get his first leading man role as an introverted travel agent living a lonely life in New York City in On the Run

The Sopranos (1999–2007)
In 1995 television writer and producer David Chase pitched the original idea for The Sopranos to multiple television networks, including commercial broadcast networks Fox and CBS, before premium network HBO picked it up. Chase who was inspired by Goodfellas while creating the show, offered Imperioli an audition for the role of Christopher Moltisanti, Tony Soprano' s immature and hot-headed protege. Imperioli believed that he had botched his audition and that he had "bored Chase to tears" due to his unemotional response to the audition. Despite this he was offered the role and following deliberation joined the show to film the pilot in 1997.

The show debuted in 1999 and was broadcast until 2007 with Imperioli playing Christopher Moltisanti throughout all six seasons. His portrayal of Christopher was met with widespread fan and critical acclaim. In 2022, David Chase would state that "Christopher was so special, and we would't have been that special if it hadn't been for Michael. He would have just been a punk." Alexis Soloski of The New York Times described his performance as "a careful calibration of volatility and technique, with his character shifting wildly from scene to scene but that instability emerges from an actor in absolute command of his instrument." Imperioli's performance would earn him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2004 as well as five additional individual Emmy nominations, two Golden Globe Award nominations and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series along with the rest of the cast.

In addition to acting on The Sopranos, Imperioli often served as a writer for the show, serving as the head writer on four episodes (From Where to Eternity, The Telltale Moozadell, Everybody Hurts, and Marco Polo)

While working on The Sopranos, Imperioli appeared in more films. In 2003 he portrayed professional poker player Stu Unger in High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story. In 2004 he would appear in My Baby's Daddy as Dominic, a slacker who discovers his girlfriend is a lesbian. The same year he would make his voice acting debut in Shark Tale as a the son of a shark mob boss.

Later work (2007–present)
In 2009, Imperioli would make his directorial debut with The Hungry Ghosts which would be earning him an International Film Festival Rotterdam - Tiger Award nomination. That year he would also star in James Cameron's The Lovely Bones as a detective tasked with investigating the murder of a teenage girl.

https://www.gq.com/story/michael-imperioli-zen-profile

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/michael-imperioli-sopranos-white-lotus-interview-2022

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/04/sopranos-star-michael-imperioli-i-thought-they-were-going-to-fire-me

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/13/1134763498/michael-imperioli-sopranos-white-lotus-hbo-television-movies

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/arts/television/michael-imperioli-the-white-lotus.html

https://www.kpcc.org/2022-10-28/actor-michael-imperioli-steps-back-into-the-spotlight-for-the-white-lotus

In addition to his role on The Sopranos, Imperioli has appeared in a number of films, including Goodfellas, Jungle Fever, Bad Boys, Malcolm X, The Basketball Diaries, Clockers, Dead Presidents, Girl 6, My Baby's Daddy, Lean on Me, I Shot Andy Warhol, Last Man Standing, Shark Tale, High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story, and Summer of Sam, which he also co-wrote and co-produced. He also wrote five episodes for The Sopranos.

Imperioli served as artistic director of Studio Dante, an Off-Broadway theater he founded with his wife. He is an active member of The Jazz Foundation of America and co-hosted their May 2009 annual benefit concert, "A Great Night in Harlem", at the Apollo Theater, which celebrated the foundation's 20th anniversary. He was a guest on the "San Giuseppe" episode of Mario Batali's Food Network television show Molto Mario. In 2010, Imperioli signed on to play the lead in the ABC television show Detroit 1-8-7. Working with the writer Gabriele Tinti, he wrote the text "Pride" for Tinti's book New York Shots, and participated in a reading of The Way of the Cross at the Queens Museum of Art in 2011.

Imperioli won the Tournament of Stars competition on the cooking show Chopped in 2014, sending $50,000 to his designated charity the Pureland Project, an organization which builds and maintains schools in rural Tibet. In 2016, he guest starred as the angel Uriel on the Fox show Lucifer.

On March 13, 2019, Imperioli was cast in the lead role of Rick Sellitto in the NBC drama series Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector. Imperioli co-hosts a podcast with Steve Schirripa titled Talking Sopranos, which began on April 6, 2020. The two provide inside info as they follow The Sopranos series episode by episode. By September 2020, the podcast had reached over five million downloads.

On September 17, 2020, Imperioli and Schirripa signed a deal with HarperCollins book imprint William Morrow and Company to write an oral history of the show; the book titled Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos was released on November 2, 2021. In July 2020, he hosted a show on NTS Radio called 632 ELYSIAN FIELDS, which was inspired by A Streetcar Named Desire. In September 2020, Imperioli provided narration for The Whistleblower, a podcast about the 2007 NBA betting scandal.

Imperioli is the guitarist and vocalist for the band Zopa. In 2020, Zopa released their debut album entitled La Dolce Vita.

Imperioli had a narrator cameo in the 2021 Sopranos prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark.

In January 2022, Imperioli was cast in a lead role in the second season of the dark comedy series The White Lotus at HBO.

Personal life
Imperioli married Victoria Chlebowski in 1996. They have homes in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Santa Barbara, California, and have three children. He and his family are avid practitioners of Tae Kwon Do. While filming The Sopranos he became addicted to alcohol before becoming sober following the conclusion of the series. Imperioli would convert to Buddhism in 2008 largely due his struggles with alcohol stating that "addiction is often a low-level search for God or spirituality or wholeness" (NYT)

In 2008, Imperioli became a Buddhist.