When we last talked, Ray Liotta was thinking a lot about mortality. “I’m at the age now there are some things you just forget,” he mused. “60 was a motherf*cker for me.” He was 64 at the time, soon to turn 65, but somehow his face, which once seemed older and wiser than its time, now seemed timeless. “Some people age better, and with some it’s like, ‘Whoa, what happened there!?’” he laughed.
“You’re like me,” he told me. “We look younger. You’ve got a babyface and you’re not lined. I have really oily skin. In high school it sucked because I had zits, so I have a whole complex about that to this day.”
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He laughed with that twinkle in his eye that propelled his iconic turns in Something Wild, Goodfellas, Field of Dreams, not to mention Cop Land, Narc, Smokin’ Aces and Hannibal. He did plenty of forgettable films too, the kind any actor does to make a living, but he could always dial it up. I’d hoped to get a glimpse into the ups and downs and the long road of a working actor, and Liotta did not disappoint.
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We met in Toronto, at the restaurant in the Marriott where the tables look over the left field of the Blue Jays ballpark. Our view was directly obscured by a window that had a spider-webbing crack. Our server told us it came from a ball hit by Jays’ first baseman Vlad Guerrero Jr., who this July won the Home Run Derby during the All-Star Game weekend with 72 blasts over three rounds. “Now he realizes he can hit the glass, he tries to do it every time,” she said, noting that when Guerrero succeeds, plates and food fly, as diners are jarred by the collision of baseball and safety glass.
The film we had met to discuss was Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, in which Liotta played a scene-stealing divorce lawyer. It was another triumphant performance, but then, so was Laura Dern’s, and the awards buzz for that season collected around her. So it goes, but I figured it would be better to hold the interview and wait for Liotta’s next best picture. He had been going through such a significant second wind at the time that a late-career Oscar seemed possible, if not probable.
Next up was The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s Sopranos prequel. I figured that would be the one, after witnessing the mastery with which Liotta played his dual roles. But when Jason Kilar dumped the entire Warner Bros. film slate onto HBO’s Max streaming platform during the pandemic, its awards hopes fizzled. For Chase, it was an ironic indignity: a carefully crafted big-screen prequel to the best series HBO had ever made, consigned to the small screen.
As I waited for the next bus, the story I would break instead was that Ray Liotta died in his sleep last May in the Dominican Republic, during the filming of Dangerous Waters.
But that tragic news wouldn’t be the end of his story: This summer, Liotta received a posthumous Emmy nomination for his turn in the Apple TV+ miniseries Black Bird, created by crime novelist Dennis Lehane. He played Big Jim Keene, the cop who agonizes over his son Jimmy [Taron Egerton]’s jail sentence for drug dealing, convincing him to take an FBI deal to win the trust of a suspected serial killer and get a confession, in exchange for freedom.
In retrospect, Liotta now seems perfect for the role, but Apple had forced Lehane to offer the part to three other actors first, and Lehane was relieved when none said yes. “Apple let me choose every other character except Big Jim Keene,” he says. “It was a weird position to be in, me rooting against myself — I was like, ‘Boy, I hope they hate this script’ — and by the time I got turned down by the third actor, I called Apple and said, ‘Can I finally go to Ray, please?’ They said yes. I got the script to him where he was working in the Czech Republic, and within 24 hours he came back and said, ‘I’m in.’”
It was a relief for Lehane, who began his career writing eminently filmable novels, from Mystic River to Shutter Island and Gone Baby Gone, before cutting his teeth on TV dramas such as The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, which led to him writing all six episodes and showrunning the fact-based Black Bird. “I wrote the part with Ray in mind,” he says. “Before I knew I was going to end up in this industry, he was on the top of the list of people I’d wanted to work with. I was a fanatic about Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, one of my favorite films. He’s the pivot, the axis on which the whole movie turns. It starts off as a madcap screwball comedy, and then he enters, and it turns into this pretty amazing evocation of the dark side of the American Dream.”
Lehane was a kid in college back then, when the film premiered in the late ’80s. “I remember going, ‘Who the f*ck is this guy?’ He just came out of nowhere. I can still see him when he first enters frame, and he dances up beside Melanie Griffith. He also had that quality in Goodfellas, and almost anything he did except for the stuff where I thought the directors were weak, which is that when Ray’s playing a sensible bad guy, you still feel the sweetness in him, the little boy. That’s in his performance in Something Wild, without a doubt, and Goodfellas, where because of Ray and his boyish charm, you forget you’re watching a stone-cold sociopath for two and a half hours. That’s because of Ray, and that boyish charm. And when he plays a good guy, you sense the malevolence in him. You half expect that sweet guy to kick the puppy across the room. It’s that duality that I always found so appealing, and it’s what made every performance he ever gave so interesting.”
Liotta doesn’t have the screen time of fellow Emmy nominees Egerton and Paul Walter Hauser, but he grounds the series as the former cop gutted by his beloved son’s decade-long sentence.
“I thought, right from the beginning, that the central relationship was between a father and son who completely love each other, even though they may be very bad for each other,” says Lehane. “This is a guy who will run into a burning building for his son, but there’s a good possibility he’s also the reason the building’s on fire. I wanted Ray because there’s a history that comes from the lived-in myth of Ray Liotta, through his work. You can do a lot of shorthand to understand who this guy was back in the day: When Jimmy says to him, ‘You were so strong,’ you have no trouble believing that, even though you’re looking at a shell of a man. Ray and I had a bunch of conversations about that. How, for all his flaws and his lack of any sort of self-awareness, Big Jim truly, truly loves his son. That dichotomy, that paradox, was really exciting to write. And it was super-exciting for him to play.”
Lehane was gutted by Liotta’s death — he says the actor was robust as hell and that Big Jim Keene’s haggard and tired look was just performance and makeup — but Lehane did get to tell the actor what those indelible performances meant to him. “I kept it close to my vest how much I admired him, and I heard he did the same with Bob De Niro when they did Goodfellas together; Ray didn’t tell him until the very end that he was one of his idols.”
Lehane chose his moment carefully. At a party he hosted, he ushered Liotta into a room and showed him a Japanese poster for Something Wild. “The original U.S. poster didn’t have Ray on it, just Melanie Griffin and Jeff Daniels, but I tracked down this Japanese poster, because it has Ray on it.” Lehane told Liotta it was his favorite film and asked if he’d sign the poster. “He looked to his fiancée and he was like, ‘Can you believe this f*cking kid? He wants me to sign a f*cking poster.’ He was so touched and it was really moving. That poster is on the way down to my basement, where I have my little home theater. I see it every day, and it just hits me every time. The last conversation we had, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have something in the next one for you. No matter what, you’re with me now.’ And this sounds clichéd, but it’s really true. The last thing Ray said to me was, ‘Make it a bigger part.’ So, it hits me every time I see that poster. I’d thought, ‘I’ll work with you forever,’ but there is no forever. Forever’s over.”
So, here’s your interview, Ray, and I hope it helps. Since we broke the ice with a tale about a broken window, we started with Liotta’s turn as the banished superstar Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. And he began by describing his regret when thrown a creative curveball he was too inexperienced to handle properly.
DEADLINE: Seeing as we’re in a baseball stadium, I guess we should start with Field of Dreams. What do you recall from that shoot?
[Laughs] For one thing, Shoeless Joe hit left-handed and threw right-handed. I bat righty and I throw lefty. The director and the producers came down and they huddled up. They said they we going to flip [the negative] like they did when Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in the 1942 film Pride of the Yankees. But they didn’t, and we left it wrong. It was only my third movie, so I didn’t have the confidence to say no. Anyhow, it seemed fine, and then one night I’m watching Monday Night Baseball, and the announcer says, “I just saw Field of Dreams, and Shoeless Joe didn’t bat that way.” [Laughs] Oh, f*ck.
RAY LIOTTA: You know, I’ve actually never seen the movie.
DEADLINE: Why not?
LIOTTA: Because my mother had cancer, and I was in the middle of doing Goodfellas. There was a screening one weekend. My dad and my mom came, and we were watching it, and she just started not feeling well. Her lungs started getting… She felt the fluid coming. She was having trouble breathing, so we just left. I don’t know why I’ve never seen it. It’s not like if I watched it, I’d cry. I mean, I’ve seen what I did, different clips, because for a while there, every paper was using it as Field of something… Whatever was going on in the government at one time or other. But that’s why I’ve never seen it.
DEADLINE: This was the third movie in your career. Can you tell while making a movie like Field of Dreams that it has a shot at immortality?
LIOTTA: You can’t tell. Not the way Field of Dreams and Goodfellas have aged. Goodfellas, really, it’s been like 28, 30 years later and I have kids coming up to me as if the movie had just come out. These kids who see it when they’re old enough. That’s just unbelievable. Even this one, Marriage Story. This is a really, really good movie. You seen it?
DEADLINE: Not yet. It’s interesting that you’ve come to Toronto for a movie you made for a streamer, coming off a TV series. Back when you were making Goodfellas and Field of Dreams, wouldn’t all this other stuff have been considered a step down?
LIOTTA: Doing a series? Oh, totally. I started out doing a soap opera. I never even wanted to do this, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I thought I’d work construction, and my dad said, “Go to college, wherever you can get in.” I walked out of my SATs. I got into the University of Miami, because, at that time, you just needed a pulse to get in there. I was just going to take regular Liberal Arts, just general stuff. When I got to the front of the line, they said I had to take a math and history class. I didn’t even want to be in f*cking college! I looked up and there was the drama department. So, I took a step over there, because I had a class in high school with my friend Gene, it was an elective. It was just fun. We laughed. I didn’t want to be an actor, but we didn’t have to do a lot of homework or anything.
Typical actor story. I’m in line. There’s a really pretty girl. She says, “You’re going to the audition tonight?” “No,” I said. I didn’t think. I’d just played sports my whole life, and she just berated me. Like, “What do you mean? You’ve got to do the plays! It’s all about doing the plays. That’s how you really learn.” Anyhow, I went out for the play. They did a production of Cabaret the year before. The leads were still there, but some people had graduated, so there were openings. So, I did the audition and I got it.
The first thing I did was a dancing waiter in Cabaret. I’m just this jock from Jersey, but because I didn’t know anybody the auditions were in front of people. I didn’t know you had to have the music memorized. There’s this piano player there, a real typical theater piano player, and he had the music, with the lyrics, in front of him. I took it. He says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’ve got to sing a song.” He says, “What, do you think I have this music memorized? No! Put it back there and just get up there and sing.” I got up and I couldn’t remember a thing…
I grew up in New Jersey. We were, like, 45 minutes to the city. My parents took me to see [the 1972 musical] Pippin there. So, I remembered one song, but all I remembered was, “We got magic to do…” I couldn’t remember the words. Then they’re yelling up at me, everybody’s watching, it wasn’t like private auditions. They said, “You’re supposed to be dancing…” [Laughs] Do you remember the [’60s British pop] group Freddie and the Dreamers? They had that song “Do the Freddie”. I started doing the Freddie dance and singing “We got magic to do! We got magic to do!”
DEADLINE: You got the job, though.
LIOTTA: The acting teacher was this guy called Buckets, and they called him Buckets because he used to play basketball. He had these glasses, thick, with a blue tint, and he would wear his hat backwards and be coaching or directing as a coach. Because I had never done this before, I just thank God he really knew what he was talking about, because if it was somebody else, I would have believed their method because I didn’t know anything.
That’s when it started, so I decided to go back the next year in between freshman and sophomore. I worked in a cemetery that, coincidentally, was called Hollywood Park. I went back and I started getting the leads in most of the shows and it kept going. Like anything, when someone’s saying you’re doing a good job you think, ‘Oh, wow, alright,’ and you keep doing it.
Now, I never even used to go to movies when I was growing up. The only movies I saw were The Beatles movies or Clint Eastwood movies. My parents would take us on Sundays to go see a movie. That’s back when they had an intermission. We’d see Bridge Over the River Kwai with an intermission, and The Sound of Music with an intermission, in these big, beautiful theaters. So, when I was there, I just started watching movies from the ’70s because that was when I was in school. [Pauses] I forgot where I started this story.
DEADLINE: Well, you were talking about college.
LIOTTA: Oh, so I went back, and I just started to do it. I just liked it. The third day I was in New York I got a commercial. Within a week I got an agent, the next week I had a manager.
Luckily, I was prepared, because back then… Well, now everything is more serious. My daughter is an actress and she’s got to do self-tapes, and that’s how they do it now. I was from the school where you just brought your picture to them, and you put it in a basket. A friend of mine from college was doing Jaws 2 or something like that. She had to sign her contract, so I went with her, and the agent said to me, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m an actor?” She said, “Oh, really? Why don’t you come back in a week or two and do a monologue for us.” I said no, because by the time I was a senior, I was going to f*cking do this right now, hell or high water. I said, “Just give me a minute.”
I went to the bathroom. I’d done Mice and Men — I played George — and there’s a really nice monologue in there that I knew from that. I came out and I just f*cking nailed it, and she signed me.
So, I was starting to go out for stuff. Within a month, I was being flown to LA for Beatles Are Forever. It was later called something else [I Wanna Hold Your Hand], it was Robert Zemeckis, one of his first movies. I didn’t get that. Then on a rainy day they gave me an audition for a soap. I said, “I don’t want to be on a f*cking soap opera.” They said, “Well, you’re going to make money doing it.” So, I ended up doing it.
DEADLINE: Which soap was it?
LIOTTA: It was Another World, and I played the nicest character in the world, Joey Perrini. The producer would go to Broadway shows, go to the people backstage that had parts he knew that were coming up, and he’d ask them, “Why don’t you come and do this? You’ll make some money, because you’re not making money here in the theater, and whatever time you need to get to the theater, I’ll make sure your stuff is done and you get there.” So, I was working with really good actors. Kathleen Widdoes was my mother. She was just great. So, I really was learning in front of the camera. Doing a soap, you don’t take it that serious, which is great because you’re looser to do whatever you want.
Then I moved to LA in ’81. I said, “I’m not doing a f*cking TV show,” but that was also a way in. I did a guest slot in Ralph Waites’ show The Mississippi [in 1983]. I played a brain-damaged kid, and Michelle Phillips, from The Mamas and the Papas, played my mom in it. I did the series, Casablanca, that David Wolper produced, then I did a series called Our Family Honor. Ken McMillan was the head of the cops, Eli Wallach was the head of the mafia, and they grew up together. That got canceled. My dad handled my money from the soap, so I was living off that.
For five years nothing really happened. I was going to an acting class with this guy called Harry Mastrogeorge, who was just great. I went for 12 years, even when I started doing movies. I’d do Something Wild, go back to class, do Field of Dreams, go back to class, do Goodfellas, go back to class. It was like working out.
DEADLINE: Your first big break was Something Wild. You were shot out of a cannon.
LIOTTA: That was my first movie. I was 31. I left to come to LA at 26, and for five years nothing was happening, but I still was going to class. I went home for Christmas, and I was like, “I’m 30 years old and, f*ck, I don’t have a movie yet.”
The only reason I got Something Wild is, thank God, because of the other guys there — we were all friends. They said, “Did you go up for this movie, Something Wild? Why don’t you call Melanie [Griffith] and ask her?” They knew I knew her because I went to college with Steven Bauer, who she was married to then. When I moved to LA I stayed at her house, and she took my place in New York. My parents were involved in politics, so they’ll call anybody for favors [laughs]. But I didn’t want to do it that way. Still, I called Melanie up and said, “Do you think you can get me an audition for Something Wild?” She said, “Yeah, sure, Ray.” I didn’t know then but the year before, the actor who played her husband in a movie was, like, an asshole, so she wanted to have approval to the guy who was going to play her husband.
So, she called up Jonathan Demme, and he said, “Melanie, I’ve got it down to three people. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s been really hard to cast this.” She said, “Jonathan, you said I could [have a say]…” So, I went in. Monday, I talked, Tuesday, they had me read with an actor. Wednesday, I read with an actress. Thursday, they said, “We want you to come in and read with Jeff Daniels.” I’m watching Johnny Carson the night before. Who’s on? Jeff Daniels. He’s talking about Woody Allen, because he’d just done Purple Rose of Cairo, which was a great f*cking movie. And Jack Nicholson, because he’d made a movie with him and Shirley MacLaine. He was talking about working with them on…
DEADLINE: Terms of Endearment.
LIOTTA: Yeah. I said, “Oh, my God.” I got down. I was doing pushups. I was looking at the script. I was like, I really got to f*cking be on my A-game. Luckily, I was working on it so much anyway. I went and did a scene that I just explode on. I just went for it, and on Saturday I get a call saying, “Jonathan wants to meet you. He’s coming from New York. He wants to meet you tomorrow at Hugo’s on Santa Monica Boulevard for breakfast. He’s flying out that afternoon.” I went, met with him, we talked. He said, “As you know, I have three other guys that I’m looking at. I’ve got to think this through, and I’ll let you know in the middle of the week.” To me, the middle of the week was the next day, Monday. Nothing. Tuesday, nothing, Wednesday, nothing. Oh, f*ck. Then Thursday I get a call. These directors, their assistants call to say, “Will you be home at three o’clock because Jonathan wants to talk to you at three?” Well, yeah. I’ve been sitting on the phone waiting for three days here. Of course.
DEADLINE: Doing pushups.
LIOTTA: Exactly [laughs]. The pushups again. He said, “Ray, I would like you to play Ray Sinclair.” That was the name of the character. I said, “Oh, wow. Thank you so much.” I hung up the phone and just cried. After years of trying.
But that happened to every actor that I really liked. I was really fortunate to work with Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins, De Niro, Pacino, really good people. So yes, it did [shoot me out of a cannon], because no one knew who I was, and suddenly here I was, this guy in this funky movie that I take over. Do you remember the movie?
DEADLINE: Of course. So, what was your second film?
LIOTTA: Dominick and Eugene. I waited for a year, because I didn’t want to get typecast as ‘that guy’, because I knew enough. I would read everything about actors. Back then the only magazine was Premiere, so I wanted to hear what actors were saying, like, how it was working.
DEADLINE: You didn’t want to be stereotyped?
LIOTTA: Yeah. I waited, like, a year. It got the same distributor, Orion, who got Something Wild. Dominick and Eugene came. I read it, and I was playing a medical student. I had a brain-damaged fraternal twin brother played by Tom Hulce, who was f*cking great. So, this is the one I want to do.
The producers weren’t sure — they thought I was the guy from Something Wild — so I said, “Let me read for it.” I mean I still tell people now, “If you have a doubt, I’ll come in and read. I don’t care about that.”
Nobody really saw that movie, but it was going to film festivals with Something Wild. So, I was the new kid. I was getting lots of scripts by then. I changed agents, I’m at CAA and all of a sudden Field of Dreams came along. It was being produced by the guys that I did the series with, Our Family Honor. They just offered it to me. I read it and I said, “This is the stupidest f*cking movie I’ve ever read. He’s got a cornfield, and he’s going to put in a baseball field and he hears voices?” That wasn’t my mentality. I was still not seasoned enough to really get it. But Kevin Costner was in it. When I first started out, Kevin, Andy Garcia, Steven Bauer, we all played paddle tennis and we were all auditioning. None of us had gotten a job yet. Kevin was the first one. It just so happened that we all became friends and things happened.
So, then I was swinging the bat for Field of Dreams. Then Goodfellas. I was the first person that Marty met, and it took a year to get it. I was at the Venice Film Festival with Dominick and Eugene and [Scorsese] said, “Let me see it.” Back then it was these big video cassettes. My dad and I were at the Excelsior Hotel. We were looking down and there was this whole big crowd of people, and my dad is like, “What the hell is going on?” I said, “Dad, that’s Marty Scorsese. That’s the director.” He was there with Last Temptation of Christ. He was getting threats, so he had all these bodyguards around him, and as I came up, they [got in the way]. I said, “I just want to talk to Marty.” He saw me do that, and he said that’s when he knew he wanted to cast me [as Henry Hill], because he’d just assumed I was the aggressive guy from Something Wild. I was like, “Whatever you want, I’ll do it.” So that’s what happened, and I was off and running. I didn’t know it would turn out how it did.
DEADLINE: Now, you have so much voiceover dialogue, delivered rat-a-tat-tat. We learn from you what is missing in many mob movies: how the system works.
LIOTTA: That’s true, because The Godfather was just, “That’s the way it was.” You didn’t see the journey to get there.
DEADLINE: And it was interesting because it was the first time I kind of understood how you make money and how you shake people down and how you basically take somebody’s restaurant and then you light it on fire because you’ve bled them dry but still can cash in on the insurance.
LIOTTA: That scene you just mentioned, that’s when they came up to tell me, “You’ve got to get home and see your mom this weekend.” I said, “I get home every…” And they said, “No, you’ve really got to get home.” It hit me. I was outside, and they say that when you get information like that, your knees buckle. Well, my f*cking knees buckled, and I was gone. I went to Marty, who’s not real emotional. We go to the trailer. He said, “Just get yourself together. We’ve got to finish this thing now.” But that was the scene that was happening, after the “do you think I’m funny” thing with me and Paul Sorvino and the guy with the restaurant who is afraid of Tommy [Joe Pesci].
DEADLINE: Wow. So, then you rush home, and your mom was…
LIOTTA: She waited for me. My mom was a big cuddler. She was a big woman. She was laying there, and she was sleeping. I put the other bed next to her and said, “Hi, Mom,” and then, maybe within 30 seconds or whatever, flat line.
DEADLINE: Oh, my. What did she ultimately die from?
LIOTTA: It was the cancer. But she was waiting for me to say goodbye. I didn’t want to go because I knew what was coming.
So, I’m crying my eyes out. By myself. I call my best friend Gene. That’s who I took the acting thing with in high school. Then I finally went. I could have gotten there maybe an hour or two earlier, but she still waited.
Then, cut to years later, my dad, at 98, he died with me sitting next to him. I was sitting next to him, but he was just old, and all his vitals were going down, so they put him in hospice. I started falling asleep. It was like seven in the morning and my sister was just washing up. She comes out. I nodded. She says, “Ray, look at Dad.” He was gone. I heard that last breath. There really is a last breath. I’m adopted, so I don’t have those genes, but my mom died when she was 63.
I didn’t go to the premiere. I didn’t even know anything about doing PR. I mean they asked, but I said no. Goodfellas, Field of Dreams, I think they sent me to places and I was getting a taste of it. It was the same feeling then of what’s happening with Marriage Story. A lot of people are talking about how it’s a really, really good movie. I play a lawyer, which is great because I’m a shark, you know.
DEADLINE: You play Adam Driver’s character’s lawyer, Jay Marotta.
LIOTTA: Yeah. He wants to do it really nice and easy, this divorce, but his wife goes and hires a really high-powered lawyer. He meets me and I’m really aggressive, so he says, “Oh no, this is not the way I want to do it.” So he goes to Alan Alda, and he’s just obviously older and says, “We’ll take care of the kid — no big deal.” He doesn’t really prepare. When they go to court, Laura Dern just chews him up and spits him out. He realizes, “Oh, f*ck, I need somebody like [Jay].”
DEADLINE: Did you see Quentin’s movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
LIOTTA: Yeah.
DEADLINE: I watched that movie, and first time I connected with Brad Pitt’s stuntman character. He was great, but then the second time I watched it I was totally wrapped up in Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of this actor who is awakened to his falling star by Al Pacino’s agent character. Then it’s all about the insecurity of an actor. I wonder, now you’ve been doing this for a really long time, how you feel about that. I mean, you’ve had times when you were winning big and then others where you might be like, ‘What’s going on, what am I doing wrong?’
LIOTTA: Thank God for Avi Lerner. He would hire people that still had some foreign value and that’s how I got through it. Going to f*cking Bulgaria for movies. Yeah. Definitely.
DEADLINE: So, he was a bit of a lifeline.
LIOTTA: Yeah. Even just lately, up until I did the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. Definitely had up and downs, no question.
DEADLINE: Is it better for an experienced actor now, given all the streaming opportunities, than maybe when you were a movie star and did only that until you got cold, and the phone stopped ringing?
LIOTTA: Yeah. But you also remember the ‘up’ times, too. I’ve had this feeling before, what’s going on with those other movies. But commercials, that got me through a downtime.
DEADLINE: What commercials did you do?
LIOTTA: The first one that I did was 1800 Tequila. Those were really great spots. It was really well done. Then just lately I did Chantix [an anti-smoking treatment]. I was reading Rolling Stone, and there was a thing about me doing the Chantix commercial. They said, for some reason, it draws you in.
DEADLINE: When you watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and see DiCaprio’s character hoping things will turn around, is it painful when you’ve gone through those uncertain periods yourself and maybe wondered, Am I going to have to sell my house?
LIOTTA: Yeah. It’s scary as shit. Luckily, I got my dad’s influence for taking care of my money and putting it aside for a rainy day. But there’s periods. It’s true. It’s like Henry Fonda said, after every movie, you wonder if they’re going to call again. I was going through that period not that long ago, before people started seeing this movie [Marriage Story]. There’s a joke that I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Two agents are walking down the hall. One turns to the other and says, “What did you think of the script that you read this weekend?” The other says, “I don’t know, I’m the only one who’s read it.” That’s what’s happening now. It’s f*cking crazy. It’s true. It’s really true.
DEADLINE: So you’re getting a lot of offers then.
LIOTTA: Not a lot, but a lot of, “I hear the new movie is really good, you’d be right for this. I’m going to send you a script.” One was just a few days ago. You’re happy about it, but part of me is saying, ‘Motherf*cker!’ I’m the same actor as I was before!’ But they need the selling point. So, with Leo’s thing [in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood], that was a different time, when doing a TV show meant your movie career was ending.
DEADLINE: Why did you do the TV series Shades of Blue with Jennifer Lopez?
LIOTTA: That’s a great question.
DEADLINE: Was the stigma already removed by that point?
LIOTTA: Yeah. This whole thing started with Netflix, with Kevin Spacey and that president thing.
DEADLINE: Yeah, there was House of Cards, and the first True Detective with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson really showed what good actors could do exploring characters and having more than two hours to do it.
LIOTTA: That was later on, but to go and do it with Jennifer, that was f*cking tough. They wanted me because I had legitimacy with what they wanted, for the thing to be edgy. With Jennifer… That’s a big question mark. I really like her. She was really good in it, but it’s not ideal. The part was so good; I really had to go after the producers and say, “You guys have got to start writing for me or just get me the f*ck out of here. I’m not her valet.” This was a really interesting character. I wasn’t saying, “Give me, Ray, more screen time.” It was just a really good character to explore: a bisexual cop who’s married, with an estranged son, who does bad things but good things.
DEADLINE: How does the writing in TV compare with the movies? You mentioned Kevin Costner: Yellowstone is an addictive show and it feels like a lot of TV is as good as, or better than, what I’m seeing on movie screens.
LIOTTA: What happened is, the studios changed. So, you’ve got to then find your way. If you say, “No, I’m never going to do that,” then, fine, don’t do it. But don’t complain if you sit at home and nothing’s happening. You’ve got to play the game to beat them at the game. And that’s what the game is now. They started with the Batman stuff and triggered the whole comic book genre, and now most of the studios are putting an unbelievable amount of money into things like that. But movies like this one, Marriage Story… Thank God for Netflix. Like I said, “Thank God for Avi Lerner,” now it’s “Thank God for Netflix,” because they’ll finance your movie. I don’t know who else would give money for Marriage Story. It’s a great movie, but it’s thought-provoking and emotional. So, you’ve got to do it because they’re doing all those kinds of movies. Like Saints of Newark. That was a lucky one.
I’ve been able to hang on to keep doing these movies because it’s been hard for me in my head to go, “Now let me be the bad guy in a comic-book movie.”
DEADLINE: How is it that you never were in a Batman or some other superhero movie, back when your star was rising?
LIOTTA: Because I was an idiot.
DEADLINE: Were you offered?
LIOTTA: Something Wild came out, so I was getting attention from that. My agent called me up and said, “Tim Burton would like to meet you. He’s doing a movie, Batman.” There were never any superhero movies then. That was pretty much the first one. I said, “Are you f*cking nuts? Batman?!” I’m going, “No, that’s stupid.” Who was stupid? I was stupid because I didn’t know.
DEADLINE: I’ve done a lot of coverage on The Sopranos, and spoke at length with David Chase for the 20th anniversary of the show…
LIOTTA: I really worked my ass off on [The Many Saints of Newark]. I just wanted to please David. It was really like I felt working with Marty. You just want to do the story, get down to what it’s about.
DEADLINE: Did you watch The Sopranos?
LIOTTA: I watched the first year or so. The only thing I watch all the time is Family Guy. Edie Falco, her first movie was a movie that I did, Cop Land, and I had a scene with her where she gives me dynamite that I was going to use to blow up something. What’s crazy is, half the time I don’t know where my keys are, but if you give me a scene, I’ll remember the day and what happened. You remember things that are really important…
[He looks at the broken window]. This is unbelievable, how cool it is talking with you about this. It’s easy to talk when you’re looking out over a baseball field. It’s like talking to my daughter. If I really want to tell her something as a dad, it’ll be while we’re taking a walk, or sitting down. It becomes too heavy when it’s face-to-face.
I guess that’s why they put a couch there when people go to shrinks, so you don’t have to look at the guy, and this way you can open up. It’s not like you’re talking. You’re just letting thoughts go.
[Pauses] Imagine we were sitting here when Vlad hit that ball?
DEADLINE: I’d probably fall out of my chair, I think.
LIOTTA: [Laughs] That’s a hell of a shot.