When I phoned Ray Liotta last September, to interview him about his genuinely astonishing performance in the (underrated!) Sopranos prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark, I was braced for the worst. Phone interviews are pretty thankless at the best of times, as it’s impossible to get a sense of a person down the phone line, and Liotta was rumoured to be difficult, truculent, rude. I didn’t care, because I was such a fan of his acting, but his acting provided few reassurances, at least from an interviewing point of view. He was ominously convincing playing psychopaths in movies such as Something Wild, Goodfellas and The Many Saints. But he was just as convincing as Gary Figgis in Cop Land and the mysterious ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in The Field of Dreams. With some movie stars – Tom Hanks, say, or Meryl Streep – we may not know what they’re REALLY like, but you’re pretty safe assuming that they’re going to give you a good interview. With Liotta, I had no idea what to expect. His baffling career (why HADN’T he become a leading man after Goodfellas?) only added to the mystery. Who was this guy?
