A well-known project with a winning track record that doesn’t involve him being a member of the mafia with a thick New Jersey accent,offered him a chance to do something different for his résumé and a chance to give some viewers a new way to look at an actor they know for a specific role. But for Imperioli, it’s work. If he’s not acting, he’s busy doing something — from writing novels and screenplays to playing in his band, Zopa.
Collaboration is always something that’s really important to me, especially when I can work with friends and people that I’ve done stuff with. My wife and I built a theater that we opened in 2003, Studio Dante, where it wasn’t really a company — it was really a theater that we ran, but it kind of became [a company] de facto. It was a lot of colleagues that we had worked with over the years in film and theater and television. And to me, it’s not just being collaborative with colleagues.
I was around 25 when I first went to Italy, and I went to Rome, which is where my family’s from. It was a very profound experience — I was really overwhelmed. I broke down in tears, and I don’t really know why. There were things that really seemed very familiar. Sounds, people’s voices, faces, smells, light. Yet it was foreign — it was familiar and foreign. I had never had that experience. I’d been to other different countries, and I was always a foreigner.
Did writer-director Mike White have any specific advice on how you could live up to what the first-season cast did?
His character is not being fully flushed out. He deserves better than this season’s WL.
Well, looks like I need to go watch season 1…