Michael Imperioli says the characters of The Sopranos might back Donald Trump if the hit HBO drama were made today.
In a recent interview with The Independent, the 59-year-old actor, who starred as Christopher Moltisanti in all 86 episodes of the series, explained how the show’s immigrant roots would collide with the current political climate.
“The show is about the American dream, especially through the eyes of immigrants,” said Imperioli. “I think that would be one of the big themes if it was made today: the current climate in the U.S. and what they're doing to immigrants. The fact is that these characters are all immigrants, but I think a lot of them would probably be Trump supporters, oddly enough.
“So how do they reconcile those things? When Italians came over — and people forget this, or they don't want to see it — a lot of them were undocumented.”
The great wave of Italian immigration into the United States started in the 1880s and ran until about 1920. Immigration laws during that period were almost non-existent. Massive numbers of immigrants who made it into the country during that period would not have been allowed in under today’s laws. The American Immigration Council provides a good breakdown here.
Sopranos creator David Chase told The New York Times in 2019 that Gandolfini's character Tony Soprano would not have been charmed by Trump.
“He would think the guy was full of [expletive],” Chase said. “Whether he thought he was a good president or not — I don’t know that Tony thought much about that question at all, with anybody who was in office. But I know Tony would have thought Trump was penny-ante, in terms of his lying and presentation.”
The Sopranos ran for six seasons between 1999 to 2007 on HBO. In its original run, the series aired during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
In 2023, Imperioli said in a since-archived Instagram post that he “forbid bigots and homophobes from watching The Sopranos, The White Lotus, Goodfellas, or any movie or TV show I've been in.”
His comments came after the Supreme Court ruled that businesses are allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people by refusing services to them based on First Amendment speech protections. You can read more about that here.