The Improbable Story of Why Scorsese Cast Ray Liotta in 'Goodfellas'
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Could you imagine any cut of Goodfellas that was missing narration from Ray Liotta's Henry Hill? He had this wonderful system for doing the garlic. He used a razor, and he used to slice it so thin that he used to liquefy in the pan with just a little oil. It was a very good system.
Yeah, we can't either. But according to a new series of interviews in Esquire—in the sprawling "Ray Liotta: An Oral History"—we almost never saw the actor, who died last year at 67, in the role. Gary Hecker, a longtime friend of Liotta's, recalled a chance encounter he and Liotta had while at dinner at 72 Market Street in Venice, CA. Across the room, apparently, was Irwin Winkler, who would later produce Goodfellas. "Ray was not the kind of guy to go up to a group of people and start talking," Hecker recalls, so he gave Liotta a nudge. "I may have given him a push and said, 'You should go talk to these people.'" Here's how Hecker remembers what ensued:
"Ray said, “Irwin, can I talk to you outside?” It’s really ballsy to go up to Irwin Winkler and say that. I remember Ray was gone for fifteen minutes, which was really a long time. It was all happenstance—getting Ray out and going to 72 Market Street, Irwin Winkler being there, Ray going up to him, which he rarely did. But that helped to grease the wheels for him to get that part.
Of course, the meeting with Winkler hardly secured Liotta the part of the intrepid Hill, who was a real-life mobster turned FBI informant. He had to meet someone named Martin Scorsese first. Also in "Ray Liotta: An Oral History," Lorraine Bracco—who played Hill's wife, Karen, in the 1990 film—remembers the first time she met Liotta at Scorsese's apartment. High stakes! But it wasn't an audition. Scorsese "wanted to see what we looked and felt like together," she says. This is how Bracco describes that day:
I never auditioned for Goodfellas. I don’t think Ray did either. He just wanted to see us together and sit down and talk. Ray was tall. He’s good-looking. He’s got dreamy eyes. It was easy to fall in love with him. And we liked each other. We just did. We flirted with each other. We fought with each other. I mean, it was like a real relationship. I think Marty enjoyed watching us, watching us fall in love, watching us fight. And he captured all of that.
Beautiful, right? That's one of many brilliant Liotta anecdotes, by the way, in the piece. Read the full oral history of Ray Liotta here.
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