Martin Scorsese on how Ray Liotta’s family tragedy benefitted a ‘Goodfellas’ scene
In May 2022, the great Ray Liotta tragically passed away in his sleep while visiting the Dominican Republic to shoot Dangerous Waters. The 67-year-old actor left behind a legacy smelted in the late 1980s with transformative roles in Something Wild and Field of Dreams and forged in his magnum opus, Goodfellas.
Though Liotta’s career had only just begun with his central role as Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 mobster classic, it raised an insurmountable bar for his years to come. Liotta’s talent shone in countless subsequent movies, from Unlawful Entry to Killing Them Softly, but Goodfellas remains his synonymous offering.
In a recent interview with Variety, Scorsese revealed how he first came across Liotta and described when he knew he’d found the right man to take on Henry Hill. “We were thinking about just a few actors to play Henry Hill, and Ray was one of them,” Scorsese remembered. “I had one concern. I knew that he could handle a role like the one he had in Something Wild, but here he would have to carry the whole picture. He had to look like he could have come out of that world, he had to have a certain innocence, he had to have authority, but most of all, he needed charm as a counterweight to the violence and the horrifying behaviour. I loved Ray’s work, we got along very well whenever we met, and I knew we could work together”.
The director added: “But still… I wondered,” he admitted. “And then, something clicked into place.”
Scorsese continued to reveal that he had been in Venice shooting his controversial movie The Last Temptation of Christ when the pair first crossed paths. “I was staying at the Excelsior Hotel. I was crossing the lobby to do an interview, and I saw Ray waving to me on the other side of the room — he was there with Dominick and Eugene,” Scorsese recalled. “He headed toward me to say hello, and he was confronted by a phalanx of security. And… he handled it. Perfectly.”
Due to the controversy of Scorsese’s latest project, he received several death threats for adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’ portrayal of Christ. “[Ray] reacted very quietly, very calmly, politely,” Scorsese continued. “He allowed them to observe their protocols, and he defused the situation. He looked at me, I looked at him, we signalled to each other that we would talk at a more convenient moment, and we went our separate ways.”
“I took a little more time to think about it, but I realise now that I was just going through the motions,” he added. “That was when I knew he would be Henry Hill.”
After the official casting had taken place and the project was underway, Liotta received some terrible news that might have hampered the project’s progress; instead, it brought unity to the cast and crew.
“One day, I was told that Ray had just gotten a call with bad news. I went to his trailer, and when I walked in he was in tears. His mother was dying,” the filmmaker recalled plaintively. “I remember his words, repeated over and over: ‘She adopted me and raised me; she’s the sweetest woman; why does she have this terrible cancer?’ I told him that he had to go there to be with her, and… he said no.”
“He was upset, it was a terrible situation, but he was going to stay and finish the day. I made sure that this was what he really wanted to do, and he assured me that it was,” he continued.
“Ray and I walked to the set together. We were shooting a scene where the characters were celebrating their first big score. We told the crew and the actors, one of whom was my father, what was happening. We started rolling. And the solidarity we all felt with Ray, the feeling of collective mourning, fueled the euphoria of the onscreen moment: tears and sorrow were transformed into laughter and jubilation.”
“I’d never experienced anything like it, and I haven’t since,” Scorsese concluded.
