The Sopranos star Michael Imperioli might have had to endure a lot as mobster Christopher Moltisanti. However, he highlighted that the “most brutal, difficult” scenes to film in the 21-time Emmy award-winning series were those where his character “had to be physically abusive with Adriana,” his girlfriend and eventual fiancée played by Drea De Matteo.
Imperioli, whose portrayal of Moltisanti garnered him an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in 2004, told The Guardian that this tremendous discomfort and difficulty with the abuse scenes was “for obvious reasons.”
“On a technical level, you’re trying to be really careful so you don’t hurt the person,” he explained. “But having to get to that point of violence towards a woman, you have to go to some nasty places to get there. Sometimes it’s very immediate. Sometimes it’s something present in your life that you can tap into. Sometimes you have to go someplace from the past. And sometimes you have to go to someplace imaginary.”
He noted that “It’s much easier shooting a mobster or shooting heroin.”
“That stuff to me is not difficult,” he added. “But that stuff with her was. Sometimes you’ll use stunt doubles, sometimes not. And even then, it’s one thing to choreograph and rehearse it, then when you act it full-tilt with all the emotion, it’s easy to not have as much control as in the rehearsal. So you really have to be quite careful.”
He even said that the scene in which Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) kills Christopher in Season 6 “wasn’t really brutal at all” in comparison to the scenes in which he abused Adriana. Imperioli, who starred in all six seasons of the HBO crime drama, deemed the late Gandolfini as the actor he has “acted the most with.”
“He always put in 110%,” he shared. “He managed to find the intensity and the reality in every moment. That pushed you further.”
All seasons of The Sopranos are now streaming on Max.
