Michael Imperioli is revealing that the most difficult scenes for him to shoot for projects are those involving violence towards women.
In an interview with The Guardianposted online Thursday, the actor noted that it was particularly difficult when his soprano The character, Christopher Moltisanti, was violent towards his fiancée Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) in the Emmy-winning series.
“The most brutal and difficult thing for me is when Christopher had to physically abuse Adriana, for obvious reasons,” he explained. “On a technical level, you are trying to be very careful not to hurt the person. But having to get to that point of violence towards a woman, you have to go to some nasty places to get there.”
Imperioli added that while sometimes it can be “very immediate” to get to that headspace for a scene, other times it’s finding “something present in your life that you can tap into.” Sometimes you have to go somewhere in the past. And sometimes you have to go somewhere imaginary.”
Although they will occasionally use doubles, the white lotus The actor noted that it’s always a challenge to go from rehearsing those scenes to filming the actual shot.
“It’s one thing to choreograph it and rehearse it, then when you’re acting with all the emotion, it’s easy to not have as much control as in rehearsal,” he said. “So you really have to be very careful.”
Imperioli finds it easier to “shoot a mobster or inject heroin” for one scene, saying, “That’s not difficult for me.”
Throughout his acting career, Imperioli has faced several violent scenes, most notably in the 1990 Martin Scorsese film. Good boys. In the infamous gangster movie, his character Spider was killed by Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito.
