The hit movie that caught Ray Liotta completely off-guard: “I thought it was dumb”
Sometimes, an actor knows from the second they read the script that a movie is going to be a success, and other times, they get hit with that realisation during shooting. On the odd occasion, they think it’s a stupid film that doesn’t make sense, but it’s got a cast to kill for, which is the situation Ray Liotta found himself in when he signed on for one of his most beloved hits.
The late Goodfellas star was never too precious about which roles he played, with Liotta being more driven by the calibre of the talent involved. That helps explain why he made some great movies with legendary directors, mediocre pictures with top-level talent, and the odd stinker that boasted a stacked ensemble.
Not many people can say they’ve played the lead in a Martin Scorsese classic, made two separate films with the Muppets, faced the wrath of a cocaine-fuelled bear, and hammed it up in an Adam Sandler comedy, all while collaborating with an eclectic list of auteurs that numbers Noah Baumbach, James Mangold, Steven Soderbergh, Jonathan Demme, and Ridley Scott.
Liotta could have easily allowed himself to be pigeonholed as a wiseguy in those post-Goodfellas years, and while he did play several characters who were cut from the same cloth, he was always willing to try something completely different to ensure that the shadow of typecasting never swallowed him whole.
In fact, the actor’s final film before Scorsese’s seminal crime story was illustrative of that fact, after Liotta played the ghost of a dead baseball player in a supernatural fantasy drama that was also a sports flick. It was an odd combination, but Field of Dreams ended up infiltrating the pop culture consciousness through its ‘If you build it, he will come’ mantra.
Liotta’s ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson kicks off the procession of ghostly baseball greats who begin descending on the field constructed by Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella, which helped power the movie to almost $85million at the box office and three Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’. Was the actor convinced from the beginning that Field of Dreams was destined for greatness? Nope, it was quite the opposite.
“When I first read the script, I thought it was dumb,” he admitted to Film Freak Central. “I didn’t see the bigger picture, that there was a whole underlying message to it. I just took it really literally, where there’s this guy with a cornfield, and he’s making money on it, and then a ghost comes. I just couldn’t wrap around it.”
Having Costner, James Earl Jones, and Burt Lancaster helped sway Liotta’s decision to board Field of Dreams, and even after it took flight among critics and crowds, he still didn’t get it. “I figured there must be something to it that I didn’t understand about the script,” he confessed of failing to grasp why so many great actors were drawn to the project. “I was willing to accept that and go with it; I would’ve been silly not to do it.”
When he saw the final product, Liotta said that even though “the success of the film didn’t surprise me,” his comprehension of the screenplay remained nonexistent. Despite the fact he “couldn’t wrap my mind around the script,” it didn’t really matter when the mere presence of his illustrious co-stars was as good a guarantee as any that Field of Dreams was going to be something special.
