Michael Imperioli

Michael Imperioli is an American actor born on March 26, 1966, in Mount Vernon, New York. His father, Dominic Ralph Imperioli, worked as a bus driver and amateur actor, while his mother, Claire Linda, née Luzzi, was a department store worker and amateur actress. His family's ancestry traces to Lazio, Sicily, and Oriolo, Cosenza, Calabria in Italy. When Imperioli was eleven, the family relocated to Brewster, New York, where he attended Brewster High School and began attending Broadway plays. After graduating in 1983, he had planned to pursue pre-med studies at the State University of New York at Albany, but the night before he was to begin college he told his parents he wanted to act. At seventeen, he moved to Manhattan's East Village and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, where he met John Ventimiglia, who would later play Artie Bucco on The Sopranos, and the two became roommates.

Imperioli's screen career began with a supporting role as Spider in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas in 1990. He subsequently appeared in films including Jungle Fever (1991), Bad Boys (1995), The Basketball Diaries (1995), Shark Tale (2004), The Lovely Bones (2009), and One Night in Miami (2020), in which he portrayed boxing trainer Angelo Dundee. He co-wrote the screenplay for Summer of Sam (1999) with Spike Lee and also wrote five episodes of The Sopranos. His directorial feature film debut came with The Hungry Ghosts (2008), which he also wrote. He portrayed Andrew Cuomo in the Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora (2018) and served as narrator in the 2021 Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark. He also appeared in the Paul Schrader-directed film Oh, Canada, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and in Song Sung Blue (2025).

The role that brought Imperioli the widest recognition was Christopher Moltisanti in the HBO crime drama The Sopranos, which ran from 1999 to 2007. For that performance he received five Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2004 for the show's fifth season. He later received an additional Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his portrayal of Dominic Di Grasso in the second season of HBO's The White Lotus in 2022. Imperioli co-hosts the podcast Talking Sopranos with Steve Schirripa, which launched on April 6, 2020, and surpassed five million downloads by September of that year. He and Schirripa also co-wrote Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos, published by William Morrow and Company on November 2, 2021.

Beyond acting and writing, Imperioli served as artistic director of Studio Dante, an Off-Broadway theater he formed with his wife. In the early 1990s he performed as lead vocalist of the New Jersey-based jangle pop band Wild Carnation before departing prior to the release of their debut recordings in 1993. He is the guitarist and vocalist for the band Zopa, which released its debut album La Dolce Vita in 2020 and headlined the Freakout Festival in Seattle in 2021. In 2014, Imperioli won the Tournament of Stars competition on the cooking show Chopped, directing the $50,000 prize to the Pureland Project, an organization that builds and maintains schools in rural Tibet.

Imperioli made his Broadway debut in 2024 in a revival of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, directed by Sam Gold and performed at the Circle in the Square Theatre alongside Jeremy Strong and Victoria Pedretti. For that debut he received the Theatre World Award in 2024.

In his personal life, Imperioli married Victoria Chlebowski in 1996. The couple have three children and live primarily in New York City on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Imperioli became a Buddhist in 2008, and he and his family are practitioners of Taekwondo.