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Michael Imperioli

At a glance

Born
March 26, 1966, Mount Vernon, NY
Role
Christopher Moltisanti, 1999–2007
Emmy
Supporting Actor, 2004 (5 nominations)
Also
Wrote 5 episodes of the series
Before
Spider in Goodfellas (1990)

Spider

His breakthrough was Spider in Goodfellas — the young waiter Joe Pesci shoots in the foot for being slow, and then kills.

The Sopranos inverts it deliberately: in season one, Christopher shoots a bakery clerk in the foot over a delayed order. Imperioli has confirmed the reference was intentional.

He's one of 27 actors in both.

Christopher

A five-nomination, one-win run for the show's saddest arc — a man raised by Tony Soprano to be like Tony Soprano, who lacks the constitution and can't be anything else.

The performance's hardest note is the one Imperioli holds for six seasons: Christopher is genuinely dangerous and genuinely pitiable, often in the same scene, and never resolves into either.

He won the 2004 Emmy for Supporting Actor.

The writing

Unusually, he wrote five episodes — one of very few actors to write substantially for a show they starred in:

  • "From Where to Eternity" (S2E22) — Christopher's near-death vision of hell
  • "The Telltale Moozadell" (S3E35)
  • "Christopher" (S4E42) — the Columbus Day episode
  • "Everybody Hurts" (S4E45) — Artie's suicide attempt
  • "Marco Polo" (S5E60)

Chase has said he was a genuinely good writer who happened to also be in the cast.

After

Life on Mars, Detroit 1-8-7, Californication, and then a career-refreshing Emmy-nominated turn in the second season of The White Lotus (2022) — playing, with some irony, a man on an Italian-heritage pilgrimage.

Since 2020 he has co-hosted Talking Sopranos with Steve Schirripa (Bobby), an episode-by-episode rewatch podcast that became one of the main drivers of the show's streaming-era revival among viewers too young to have watched it first time.

He is also a musician, a practicing Buddhist, and has written a novel.

See also