Michael Imperioli interview: ‘A mobster offered to show me how to kill’

The Sopranos star has had brushes with the mafia in his life and career – and now the mob is the subject of his new Sky History series

Michael Imperioli first ­became interested in the ­mafia when he was a schoolboy. The Sopranos actor vividly remem­bers being about 11 years old and watching The ­Godfather Saga – a TV edit of the first two Francis Ford Coppola films into one mini-series – over four nights with his grandmother. 
“Her father came from southern Italy and started a business in the United States that, during Prohibition, you know, was a speakeasy. He worked outside the law, if you will,” Imperioli, 58, says. “I have no reason to believe he was an actual ‘made’ member of the mafia. Did he have ties? Maybe. I don’t think he was part of the Five Families, but my grandmother had some kind of aff­i­nity to the story of this immigrant and his family who came over here with very little and tried to make the American Dream come true.”
Having been enraptured by that story of the violent underworld as a youngster in 1970s and 1980s New York, when Imperioli started acting, one of his first roles was as Spider in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. It was at that point he began to learn more about the bloody history of the Five Families – Genovese, Gambino, Bonanno, Colombo and Lucchese – who for decades ruled New York and built empires in the Empire State.
Once Imperioli started looking, the history of the mafia was hard to avoid. One evening, while at Rao’s, a New York restaurant steeped in Mob lore, with his Sopranos co-star Tony Sirico, a “made man” (a fully-fledged mafia member) came to their table and offered to demonstrate the “correct way” to strangle someone using piano wire. “I told him, maybe after dessert might be a better time,” Imperioli laughs. Did he ever get that lesson? “It remained unfulfilled, but it’s easily imagined.”
Imperioli also found a lot of overlap between his passion for films and interest in the mafia. “I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience in my family, they weren’t part of the Five Families or anything like that. But The Godfather, to some degree, was a somewhat romanticised version of these stories,” he says. “People really felt with Don Corleone – who broke the law, was a criminal and a murderer – that there was some kind of moral code and honour to this character.”
Imperioli – who as well as being an Emmy-winning actor is the guitarist in the indie-rock band Zopa, and a novelist – has channelled his interest in the mafia into narrating American Godfathers: The Five Families, a three-part Sky History documentary series. The mafia, made notorious by the likes of Lucky Luci­ano, Paul Castellano and John Gotti, originated in Sicily and south­ern Italy, and was exported to the US in the early part of the 20th century. Blood ran thicker than water, loyalty was prized above almost anything else, and a code of omertà (silence) was rigorously observed.
At first, much of the criminality was fairly low-level – gambl­ing, extortion, prostitution – but the Prohibition years helped the mafia to flourish by bootlegging alco­hol and running speakeasies. “It allowed them to reach heights of making money, and also influence in politics and law enforcement that they never would have had the opportunity for before,” says Imperioli. 
Mobsters continued to accumulate power and wealth before reaching their heyday in the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon signed the ­Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act into law. Prosecutors were emboldened to take on organised crime, while tougher sentences meant that underlings were much less willing to go to prison for long stretches in order to protect their bosses.
Imperioli’s new series seems like the kind of thing that Tony Soprano would have enjoyed watching, I tell him. “Oh, definitely, yeah,” he says. “He was a history buff, Tony Sop­rano.” Imperioli reckons that, if Soprano were real, he would have enjoyed learning about the pre-Rico history, when the “code of omertà was a lot more adhered to”.
Soprano was, of course, played with aplomb by the late James Gandolfini, and his character served as mentor to his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti, played by Imperioli. In reality, just five years ­separated the actors’ ages and Imperioli says that they were “much more friends on the same kind of level”.
Gandolfini’s sense of humour helped. On his first day filming The Sopranos, Imperioli had to reverse a car at speed down a tree-lined pavement while avoiding extras playing pedestrians. The only problem was that he couldn’t drive – and didn’t tell anybody. Inevitably, he crashed. “I thought they were going to fire me, but they just brought a new car,” he says. “Jim thought it was terrible and was laughing uncontrollably.”
One criticism often levelled at The Sopranos, and other dramas like it, is that it glamorises some pretty nasty behaviour, but Imperioli gives the idea short shrift. “Glamorise is a strange word. It definitely entertains people,” he says. “The Sopranos is a very entertaining show, but the violence and tragedy live side-by-side with its entertaining qualities, the funny sides of it, or the more sexy sides of it.” He adds: “I can’t imagine anybody watching the show wanting to live that kind of lifestyle, because a lot of the characters, their lives were cut short, met violent ends, they had violent lives, unhappiness, drug abuse, broken marriages, murder, maiming and all that stuff.”
He remains 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 bashfully. “We’re much more indie-alternative kind of rock.” Imperioli and his Zopa bandmates are gearing up for a series of live shows and will release an album next year. 
While his most famous roles have come in mafia dramas, Imperioli has won acc­laim by broadening his range in recent years. He was nominated for an Emmy – his first nod since The Sopranos ended – for his role as the sex-addict Hollywood producer Dominic Di Grasso in The White Lotus. Like Di Grasso, who looks to reconnect with his Italian family, Imperioli first visited his kin in Rome when he was 25 and regularly returns. “They have an affinity for the family that goes to America. When we come back and say ‘Hello’, it’s cool.”
He also made his Broadway debut this year, opposite Succession’s Jeremy Strong in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Strong, as Dr Thomas Stockmann, tries to raise the alarm about harmful bacteria in his town’s spa baths, but Imperioli’s Peter Stockmann, the mayor, tries to prevent him blowing the whistle. In one post-interval scene, the house lights stayed up during a town-hall meeting and the audience were encouraged to feel as if they were part of it. One night, a group of climate-change protesters interrupted the show and blasted the theatre industry for not doing enough to raise awareness of global warming. Strong and Imp­er­i­oli remained in character throughout; the latter says he didn’t know if the protesters were planted by the director, Sam Gold, and he, as Stockmann, ushered them out.
“[Peter Stockmann] didn’t agree with their point of view, so I kind of shouted them down and then took it upon myself to eject one of them,” he says. “As I started to eject him, I realised this was probably not arranged by the director, but at the same time, these protesters were engaging as theatre, in a way.
“It was thrilling, something inc­redibly real was happening, something completely unex­pected, unrehearsed, and you were able to interact with it as an actor in a safe way.” He adds: “If the protes­ters were different types of people, it might not have been safe, but they were, I think, pretty responsible.”
If New York were still in the grip of the Mob, you could imagine the mayor trying to cover up something like the spa bacteria. Does Imperioli still feel the mafia’s legacy in his hometown? 
“It’s much, much less. I mean, from what I know, the families have moved on into businesses that are a lot less vulnerable to prosecution, and much less on the street,” he says. “But there’s places in New York that are still… restaurants and bars that are still, I would assume, controlled by them.” 
American Godfathers: The Five Families is on Sky History on Oct 6
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