How Michael Imperioli nearly tanked his ‘White Lotus’ Season 2 audition: The actor says the comedy was so good he was nearly hired to replace Bryan Singer as Singer.
Michael Imperioli is a pretty solid actor in his own right, but it will be years before he can match the box-office power of Bryan Singer.
At 30, Imperioli is a decade older than his friend, the now-retired Singer. In that time, he’s gone from a modest voice actor in the ’80s to an Oscar winner, an Oscar nominee, and a global star, landing the role of Frank Underwood’s (Matt Damon) lawyer in Matt Damon’s ‘Good Will Hunting’.
But it will be another decade before Imperioli is a household name.
He came close. He’ll tellyou why.
The ‘White Lotus’ audition
Imperioli first auditioned for the role of Frank Underwood’s lawyer in ‘Good Will Hunting’ in January and was asked back for another round of auditions. He turned down the role a second time, saying the material wasn’t resonant or funny enough. In short, this isn’t a big, high-profile series.
It turns out, he was right. The series ran for six episodes but it bombed.
For the past year, Imperioli has been hard at work on a new project. But the project is not a big series either, and the part is not even a very high-profile one. It’s a single-camera comedy he’s written and will star in — ‘Boom,’ according to IMDB.
In fact, Imperioli first heard of the project this fall when he received a call from Jason Bateman, the actor who plays Frank Underwood’s lawyer on ‘Good Will Hunting.’
“I think he probably was asking me to do the part because we just had dinner the other night, Jason was telling me about a small comedy he was working on,” Imperioli says. “At the time he was in a comedy called ‘The Detainment.’”
Bateman, a comedy veteran, was working on that