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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.

Today we continue our series featuring some of our favorite interviews of the year with Michael

Imperiali. He starred in the second season of the HBO series The White Lotus, which

recently concluded, but the entire season is streaming and on demand. Imperiali spoke

with our producer Sam Brigger last month. Here Sam.

Michael Imperiali had a busy year. He starred in the HBO series The White Lotus. His first novel

was reprinted and his band Zopa came out with some new music. Imperiali made his name

as an actor in the influential TV series The Sopranos, playing Christopher Maltesanti,

the violent gangster with impulse control issues, who's got a father figure in Tony Soprano,

not a great role model. Imperiali has been thinking about The Sopranos a lot in the

last few years. In 2021 he published a book called Woke Up This Morning, the definitive oral

history of The Sopranos, co-written with Steve Sharipa, who played gangster Bobby Bakalai on the

show. The book came out of the podcast they started during COVID called Talking Sopranos,

where they went back and watched the whole series all over again.

Michael Imperiali published his first novel The Perfume Burnt His Eyes in 2018, which was

re-released this month. It's a coming of age novel set in 1976 New York, and one of the characters

is another, perhaps flawed father figure, Lou Reed. But let's start with The White Lotus,

the Emmy-winning HBO series created by Mike White. The second season wrapped up earlier this month

and is available streaming. In season two, Michael Imperiali plays Dominic DeGrasso, a successful

Hollywood producer with a sex addiction, who has destroyed his marriage by cheating on his wife

...