The Guardian - Interviewing Ray Liotta was a unique experience

Muristek

Interviewing Ray Liotta was a unique experience - he was an actor without pretence

Link [2022-05-28 11:54:44]

The Many Saints star was impervious to my attempts to butter him up – maybe his lack of air-kissing pretension is what stopped him becoming a leading man after Goodfellas

Peter Bradshaw: Liotta had boyish radiance

When I phoned Ray Liotta last September, to interview him about his genuinely astonishing performance in the (underrated!) Sopranos prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark, I was braced for the worst. Phone interviews are pretty thankless at the best of times, as it’s impossible to get a sense of a person down the phone line, and Liotta was rumoured to be difficult, truculent, rude. I didn’t care, because I was such a fan of his acting, but his acting provided few reassurances, at least from an interviewing point of view. He was ominously convincing playing psychopaths in movies such as Something Wild, Goodfellas and The Many Saints. But he was just as convincing as Gary Figgis in Cop Land and the mysterious ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in The Field of Dreams. With some movie stars – Tom Hanks, say, or Meryl Streep – we may not know what they’re REALLY like, but you’re pretty safe assuming that they’re going to give you a good interview. With Liotta, I had no idea what to expect. His baffling career (why HADN’T he become a leading man after Goodfellas?) only added to the mystery. Who was this guy?

Well, after talking with him on the phone, I can say this: he was, and probably always was, totally himself. This might sound like a bit of a non-answer, but it’s very rare to interview an actor who doesn’t bullshit you a little. After all, they’re trained to perform, to be liked, to get applause. Liotta was utterly uninterested in any of that to an occasionally comical extent. I asked, attempting to butter him up, if he was aware of his amazing screen presence. “Nah, not really.” He was adopted but found his birth mother as an adult – did that change his sense of self? “Not really.” What’s his approach to acting? “Just play pretend.”