Ray Liotta spent the months leading up to his sudden death on set, where he belonged.
“Black Bird,” the Apple TV+ true crime series that premiered Friday, was one of Liotta’s last projects before he died in his sleep in the Dominican Republic in late May.
Liotta played the father of Jimmy Keene (star Taron Egerton) who watches his son arrested on drug and gun charges and sentenced to 10 years in a minimum security prison, then go undercover to try to coerce a confession from an accused serial killer.
The relationship between father and son, Egerton said, is “absolutely the heart of the show.”
“The show is dark, it’s intense, it’s grim, and that relationship, as imperfect as it is and as flawed and dysfunctional as it is, is a beautiful relationship. It’s two men who love each other completely, completely unconditionally, even to a fault,” the 32-year-old British actor told the Daily News.
“You watch those two characters ignore the problems in their relationship because their love is so all-consuming.”
Egerton’s Jimmy, who agrees to be transferred to a maximum security prison in exchange for the promise of an early release, makes the deal when he sees the disappointment in his father’s eyes – a former police officer whose own son ran boldly and dramatically afoul of the law – but also the guilt. Big Jim takes the blame on himself, feeling that he failed his son by letting him turn into a criminal.
“It’s absolutely key to the show that that relationship feel real and work and it was my extraordinary privilege that I had Ray Liotta to build that relationship with,” Egerton told The News.
“I cannot imagine anyone else in the world that I would feel as satisfied doing that with. It was an incredible, incredible experience.”
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