Ray Liot­ta: ​‘Every char­ac­ter I’ve played is so far from who I am’

Two fine­ly con­trolled act­ing explo­sions seared Ray Liot­ta into the pub­lic con­scious­ness. As Ray Sin­clair, he turns up halfway through Jonathan Demme’s Some­thing Wild, top­pling Melanie Grif­fith and Jeff Daniels’ sexy screw­ball romance into a sweaty night­mare with his charis­mat­ic threat. Four years lat­er as Hen­ry Hill in Mar­tin Scorsese’s Good­fel­las, his unnerv­ing, bug-eyed cack­le was the cat­a­lyst for Joe Pesci’s ​“Fun­ny how?” meltdown.

But these great per­for­mances led nowhere. ​“Even Jonathan didn’t realise how intense the sec­ond half had got­ten,” Liot­ta admits of Some­thing Wild. Seem­ing­ly unnerved by his sin­gu­lar pow­er, Demme and Scors­ese nev­er imag­ined him for oth­er roles. He’s The Irish­man​’s glar­ing absen­tee; to Scors­ese, it appears he will always be Hen­ry Hill. In the 1990s, Liot­ta end­ed up as just anoth­er heavy.

If he nev­er became the Oscar-con­tend­ing lead­ing man he tried des­per­ate­ly hard to be, the 21^st cen­tu­ry has been kinder. At 64, he can now reflect on a string of dis­tin­guished char­ac­ter roles, from hav­ing his frontal lobe scooped out and fried while con­vers­ing with Antho­ny Hop­kins in Han­ni­bal, to play­ing com­bustible divorce lawyer Jay Marat­ta in Noah Baumbach’s Mar­riage Sto­ry. He may be heav­ier-set and whiter-haired these days, but the old inten­si­ty is still there, and that is pre­cise­ly what Baum­bach wanted.

“He told me that the first time he saw me on screen I’d scared him a lit­tle – maybe it was Some­thing Wild,” Liot­ta mus­es in his unsoft­ened New Jer­sey accent. ​“Jay does what­ev­er it takes to win. [Adam Dri­ver, as Jay’s client, Char­lie] was giv­ing me infor­ma­tion when he prob­a­bly didn’t even know he was. Like he can tell a social sto­ry, ​‘She had to hold the wall to come down, it was so cute when she drinks’ – boom! I use that right in court.”

Was Liotta’s own divorce in 2004 more ami­ca­ble than that depict­ed in Baumbach’s bruis­ing tragi­com­e­dy? ​“Well, I had a prenup,” he explains, ​“because I’d already done a bunch of movies, and she was mar­ried before to a pro­fes­sion­al base­ball play­er, so she had a nest egg. The good thing in one sense – and a bad thing in anoth­er – is that you have to split in half the mon­ey you make while you’re togeth­er. That was a bad peri­od for me, and when I was work­ing it was most­ly inde­pen­dent, where there’s bare­ly any mon­ey to begin with.”

Liot­ta had to learn to ride out such career dips ear­ly in his career. At 21, he was tempt­ed away from the New York the­atre scene into three years as, iron­i­cal­ly, ​“the nicest guy in all Amer­i­ca,” in day­time soap Anoth­er World. Even there, ambi­tion burned, and not a sec­ond was wasted.

“[The­atre and soap vet­er­an] Kath­leen Wid­does was one of the best actors I ever worked with,” Liot­ta recalls fond­ly. ​“She played my moth­er, and she was so open and real that it drew me in.” After mov­ing to Los Ange­les in his mid-twen­ties to be a film actor, ​“not much hap­pened” until the week of Liotta’s 30^th birth­day, when he was per­suad­ed to ring his vague asso­ciate Melanie Grif­fith to enquire about Some­thing Wild. His last-minute audi­tion changed his life.

“I was angry, and I was ready, and it worked out,” Liot­ta said of the expe­ri­ence at the time. Was the shock­ing, wild force of his per­for­mance the result of his tal­ent, thwart­ed for so long, burst­ing free? ​“No, it wasn’t so much the per­son­al thing,” he admits. ​“It was writ­ten as such a flashy, movie tone [shift] where it just became mine towards the end. It had to do with what the char­ac­ter was. [Griffith’s char­ac­ter] was my wife, I was in jail, she’s fuck­ing around with some­body else. That pro­pelled me.”

Liot­ta ini­tial­ly resist­ed being type­cast, not work­ing for two years post-Some­thing Wild until land­ing the role of the kind broth­er of a learn­ing-dis­abled twin in 1988’s Dominick and Eugene. Then, after Good­Fel­las, there was a sim­i­lar lull before he played a decent sur­geon along­side Kiefer Suther­land in Arti­cle 99. Both films flopped. Maybe those pierc­ing blue eyes and that slit, down­turned grin have restrict­ed Liot­ta to dark­er parts.

When I sug­gest this to him – that despite doing every­thing right, the way his career panned out was nev­er real­ly up to him – Liot­ta sud­den­ly leans in, fix­ing me with those blue, burn­ing eyes. This isn’t Good­fel­las; he isn’t intim­i­dat­ing. But despite his soft­er appear­ance and Sun­day morn­ing attire, his unique inten­si­ty is here in the room.

Of course, the Amer­i­can bad­lands occu­pied by cops and rob­bers late­ly offered con­sid­er­able vari­ety to Liot­ta, any­way, from play­ing the weari­ly hon­est dad to John­ny Depp’s drug-run­ner in Blow, to the sad Mafia pat­sy iced by Brad Pitt in Killing Them Soft­ly. The eerie men­ace of his cor­rupt cop in The Place Beyond the Pines, eyes glint­ing as he beck­ons Bradley Coop­er to his poten­tial demise, might seem mere type­cast­ing. But this potent screen pres­ence is all his own.

“When I was doing Good­fel­las, my moth­er was dying – and did die – from can­cer in the mid­dle of [film­ing],” Liot­ta reveals. ​“I had to go across the street and pis­tol-whip a guy, and I just remem­ber think­ing about my moth­er. It real­ly made me angry. I brought out­side stuff in and per­son­alised it there. But it’s impos­si­ble to per­son­alise [gen­er­al­ly], because every char­ac­ter I’ve played is so far from who I am.”

The fierce deter­mi­na­tion that saw Liot­ta seize his moment in Some­thing Wild has rarely steered him wrong. He went right after Scors­ese at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val for Good­fel­las, and pressed Rid­ley Scott in the gym for Han­ni­bal. Hav­ing repeat­ed­ly turned down roles in HBO’s The Sopra­nos, Liot­ta recent­ly went the extra mile again for its film pre­quel, The Many Saints of Newark, fly­ing out for lunch with David Chase even though the pro­duc­er wasn’t con­sid­er­ing him for a part. ​“The actor they want­ed was say­ing, ​‘I don’t get out of bed for less than…’ – what­ev­er idiot thing he said. And for David, here’s Ray Liot­ta, who flies out and doesn’t even know he’ll get the movie. Then boom, I got it and then some.”

It was Ray Sinclair’s obses­sive desire which Liot­ta respond­ed to in that break­through role, the same deter­mi­na­tion he recog­nised and admired in his hero, Robert De Niro. You get the sense speak­ing to Liot­ta that this same qual­i­ty is what con­tin­ues to dri­ve him. ​“I used to be very method, where I would live with [a part] con­stant­ly in my mind,” he reflects. ​“I wasn’t good to be around social­ly. But I [still] care for it just as much. The burn is the same. I might not have to hold it all in my head, I can watch TV for a while. But to this day I learn every sin­gle line before I start work­ing. I still have that dis­ci­pline, because I still feel like I haven’t made it.”

Mar­riage Sto­ry is out now. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.