Michael Imperioli had to be taken to hospital filming his Goodfellas scene

Last Updated on August 12, 2024

Dance! Dance! In Goodfellas, Spider made the fateful mistake of telling Tommy to do something almost as insulting as going home to get his shinebox. But for Michael Imperioli, that scene made him dance all the way to the emergency room.

Reflecting on working on Goodfellas as he was just trying to get his career going, Michael Imperioli remembered turning down a stunt double for the scene in which Joe Pesci’s character shoots and kills him – not long after giving him the only trigger warning the film needs. Because the prop guy handed him a real glass instead of the usual “sugar glass” used on sets, Imperioli actually cut himself so badly that Martin Scorsese had to pause the entire set. That’s bad enough but imagine the horror the hospital team faced when they saw this kid riddled with bullet holes. “They took me to the emergency room. And we walk in, and the hospital staff starts freaking out: ‘Code blue!’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, I cut my finger.’ They’re coming at me with stretchers because I have three bullet holes in my chest. They think I’m about to die. It’s in Queens—they don’t know!”

With Michael Imperioli about to be operated on as if he was actually blasted by a short-tempered mobster with zero sense of humor, he informed the staff that he was just filming a movie with Robert De Niro. “They think I’m delirious. They put me on a stretcher and bring me into the trauma care, and they finally cut my shirt open and see all the squibbing. I said, ‘I told you, I’m in a movie. Robert De Niro!’” After a few more hours of waiting – a cut finger being probably a one on the pain level compared to a gunshot wound – Imperioli was finally treated and released. “And then I went back and shot a couple more takes. I think it’s the first take, though, that’s in the movie.”

Michael Imperioli would go on to commit his own brutal acts on The Sopranos but his small bit in Goodfellas remains a crucial moment in his career, landing him frequent spots in Spike Lee movies. He even gave a little shoutout to Scorsese on a season one episode of The Sopranos when he yells at the director (played by Anthony Caso), “Kundun – I liked it!” Interestingly, Scorsese did not like the HBO drama, saying he couldn’t identify with that generation of gangsters.

Where does Goodfellas rank as far as Michael Imperioli roles go? How about that scene in your list of most memorable from the film?