“You suck”: why Ray Liotta lambasted Bradley Cooper
Famed for his intensity, Ray Liotta never needed much encouragement or motivation to get into character when it required him to fly off the handle, which did admittedly have the unfortunate side effect of incinerating the highest-grossing movie of Bradley Cooper’s career at the time.
After catching his first big break on J.J. Abrams’ hit spy series Alias, Cooper quickly grew bored of the show and requested that he be written out in favour of focusing on his big screen aspirations. When he did, Wedding Crashers outlined that it was a wise decision, with his smarmy turn as Sack Lodge doing wonders for his profile.
He was still on the hunt for a genuine smash hit where his name came first in the credits, though, which he eventually found in some style when Todd Phillips’ The Hangover shattered a record set by Beverly Hills Cop a quarter of a century previously. It became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever in the United States on its way to a global box office haul just shy of $470million.
Inevitably, the band was quickly gathered back together for a sequel, and while it may have earned more money than its predecessor, The Hangover Part II was an uninspired re-tread. At the same time, Cooper had continued broadening his horizons, which led him directly into the path of Liotta on the set of Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines.
An ambitious and emotionally draining film, Liotta was required to try and get under Cooper’s skin as the unscrupulous Deluca, who had to shake down his scene partner Avery in one exchange. As the late Goodfellas star’s agent Beth Holden-Garland recalled to Esquire, Cooper’s performance “wasn’t getting there”, which led to Cianfrance encouraging Liotta to let rip.
“Derek pulled Ray aside and goes, ‘I want you to really fucking let loose on him now. Just say whatever you want to him,'” she said before Liotta revealed himself to be one of just many people who found The Hangover Part II to be a much lesser and exponentially lazier version of the first film.
Deciding that shitting all over a comedy sequel was the best way to drag Cooper’s performance up to his level, Liotta let rip. “Ray got in Bradley’s face and said, ‘You are the luckiest actor in town. You suck, Hangover II sucked’. He just ripped into him like nobody’s business,” Holden-Garlan continued. “Then Derek was like, ‘Action!’, and then they got the scene.”
It was an interesting approach to squeezing out the required tension between the characters, but even though Cianfrance conceded it was an “emasculating and humiliating” way of going about it, he still remembers it being among “the greatest moments in my life”. Cooper may not have been lucky, but The Hangover Part II definitely sucked, so Liotta was hardly lying on all counts.
