A Soprano No More

Michael Imperioli is standing just inside the door of Scarlet, he and his wife's new bar and restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

- Mervyn Rothstein, Ashok Sinha

It's a quarter century since "The Sopranos" began and nearly 17 years after the game-changing TV series last aired, but it's hard not to still imagine him as Christopher Moltisanti, his Emmy Award winning role as Tony Soprano's murderous, excitable and terminally depressed young relative and potential heir apparent.

It's perhaps a little too easy to fantasize that Imperioli will greet a visitor on this bitter cold winter afternoon with the news that a recent victim already "sleeps with the fishes." But no. This is 2024. Moltisanti was long ago, and the actor, writer, director and restaurateur Imperioli has had a prolific career in film and television, most recently portraying Dominic Di Grasso, a sex-addicted Hollywood executive in the second season of "The White Lotus," which brought him a 2023 Emmy Award nomination. The 57-year-old Imperioli has a voice that is calm, soft, relaxed and restrained as well as a full head of hair that's far along the road to gray. This season, he is starring on Broadway at Circle in the Square in a new revival of Henrik Ibsen's classic drama An Enemy of the People.

No matter how much he's done, he says, sitting in an appropriately scarlet private area of the new restaurant, he continues to be stopped on the street and hailed for his decades-old role.

"Now more than ever," he says, as the show's six seasons are back on HBO to commemorate the 25th anniversary. "There's a whole new audience of 'Sopranos' fans. There are young people who weren't even born or were way too young to see it when it was first on the air who have discovered it. It's become very beloved to people. It's one of the best series ever on TV. Not a lot of series find successive generations that become obsessed with it. There are a lot of shows that did really well in their day and nobody really watches anymore.”