• Faith: Buddhist
• Career: Actor
• Birthday:  March 26, 1966

Michale Imperioli is an actor best known for his role as Christopher Moltisanti in the HBO series “The Sopranos” from 1999 to 2007, earning him a Primetime Emmy Award. Early in his career, Imperioli played Spider in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” He’s also had roles in films like “Jungle Fever,” “Bad Boys,” “Shark Tale,” and “The Lovely Bones.” In 2022, he had a supporting role in the HBO series “The White Lotus.” Imperioli is also a screenwriter, having co-written the “Summer of Sam” screenplay with Spike Lee. He also wrote five episodes of “The Sopranos.”

Imperioli was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of Dan Imperioli, a bus driver and amateur actor, and Claire Imperioli, a department store worker and amateur actress. His ancestors immigrated to New York City from Italy. At age 11, Imperioli and his family moved to Brewster, New York, and in high school, he started watching Broadway plays.

After graduating from Brewster High School in 1983, Imperioli planned on studying pre-med at the State University of New York at Albany. However, the night before he was set to begin college, he confided to his parents that he sought to be an actor. At 17, Imperioli moved to Manhattan’s East Village, where he enrolled at Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute to study acting. While there, he met John Ventimiglia, who later portrayed Artie Bucco on The Sopranos, and the two became roommates.

In the early 1990s, Imperioli performed as the lead vocalist of the band Wild Carnation, departing to focus on his acting career before releasing their debut recordings in 1993

Is Michael Imperioli religious?

In 2008, Imperioli became a Buddhist. In an interview, he said, “I was going through a very difficult personal issue in my life a couple of years ago, and I spoke to a Buddhist teacher, and he just said to me, ‘Everything changes, everything will pass.’ It didn’t solve my problem. I still had to go through the difficulty and uncertainty and emotions of it, but when you keep aware of that and do come out of it, like a few weeks or a couple of months later, I didn’t think about this problem anymore. It was completely out of my life.”