High on the hog

Ray Liotta, if the internet is to be believed, does not bullshit; nor does he have tolerance for same. Oh Lord. However will I make it through our meeting? Before we’re led off into a nice London hotel suite for our chat, I wander into a mini press gathering and get to see him in action with the ladies and gentlemen of that profession.

It’s not always a pretty sight.
When one hackette starts scribbling furiously as he informs the assembled throng that he rarely, if ever, watches the movies he appears in, he fixes her with those furiously intense eyes.
“Yeah. You wrote that one down.”
Then he smiles in a way that communicates ennui and bemusement in equal measure. And here it comes…
“Heh heh”.
Only Edna Krabappel can claim to have a laugh more distinctive that the one we’ve just heard.
Happily, once away from the pack, Mr. Liotta is a more malleable interviewing prospect. Polite and straightforward in his endearingly blue collar New Jersey way, he’s happy to talk about anything though it’s clear he has reservations about this whole film malarkey.
“It’s not what I signed up for,” he says. “It’s all about publicity and numbers. In LA, there’s the same crap every Monday morning. Everybody knows how every movie has performed at the weekend. All decisions are based around those figures. And it perpetuates itself. You take Tom Hanks. He has a big hit so the next time they’re casting they think ‘Let’s hire Tom Hanks and get a big hit.’ That’s fine. Whatever. It’s been like that since Jaws. But this obsession with numbers has killed the acting profession. I think of all the great actors in the early ‘70s who made me want to act. Would they have found work in most of the films they’re making now? I doubt it.”
After what he describes as a fairly erratic decade, Ray Liotta is back on top of the business he feels so ambiguously toward. Shootin’ Aces, an ensemble Las Vegas- based gangster flick did respectable box-office at the beginning of 2007. Wild Hogs, meanwhile, a male menopause comedy starring John Travolta, William H. Macy, Martin Lawrence and Tim Allen as weekend biker dads who make enemies with Liotta’s properly hard crew, has taken phenomenal amounts of cash from American theatres and boosted the stock of all involved.
“It may just have been good timing,” says Liotta. “When you come to the end of the Oscar season when all the heavy films are out, a comedy is a nice change of pace. And for me it was a great chance to kick back and ride motorcycles. I mean I’ve been on sets were it gets ugly and intense. I remember making Copland with De Niro and Keitel. There was a lot of testosterone around. A lot of macho behaviour and swearing. It wasn’t always comfortable.”
Though we’ve all seen Liotta dig up decaying bodies in Goodfellas, you can see why such swaggering behaviour is not really for him. He admits he’s a lone wolf within the industry. He doesn’t hang out with other actors, and prefers the company of four New Jersey guys he’s known from kindergarten.
“Whatever works for you is fine with me,” he says. “But I’m working in movies all the time when as soon as the take is over, you have an actor checking his own personal monitor to make sure they’ve got his best side. That’s not acting. And I’m not great around that level of self-regard.”
Born Raymond Julian Vicimarli to an Irish mother, Ray was adopted at the age of six months by Alfred and Mary Liotta in 1955. Both of his parents unsuccessfully ran for political office, a fact that doesn’t sit well with their son.
“I have an interest in what’s going on in the world,” he says. “I just don’t wear my politics on my sleeve. I have my own opinions but I don’t look to endorse one person or another. I had such a bad experience watching my parents that I don’t trust most politicians as far as you could throw them. But to each his own. I vote. That’s the only way I want to exercise my political voice. When you play make believe for a living, you’re kind of distanced from reality. I know it’s great that there are people out there like Bono who can do both things. But it’s not who I am.”
In 1987, he hired a private detective and tracked down his biological mother, a decision he’s still glad about.
“She’s since passed on,” he says. “So I can’t tell you about my Irish roots. But it was a relief to know that it was because she wanted a good life for me. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. I have a family. But my then wife and I were getting ready to have a kid and we wanted to know if there were any implications. But really, for me at that point, I was personally past any curiosity.”
A gifted high-school athlete, young Ray would excel in varsity soccer and basketball while working part-time in his dad’s auto supply shop. After graduation, he attended the University of Miami, where he discovered a love of musicals. Appearances in collegiate productions of Cabaret and The Sound Of Music encouraged him to major in drama and within a year he had landed a role on the soap opera Another World.
His first film role was in The Lonely Lady, an inauspicious Pia Zadora vehicle from 1983, but his psychotic turn in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild would create a huge demand for his services. He avoided typecasting by sticking with sensitive roles in Dominic And Eugene and Field Of Dreams, but Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s magnificent crime drama, would forever fix him as a gangster in the collective consciousness.
For most of the ‘90s, he struggled to vary his output, starring in family fare such as Operation Dumbo Drop> and Muppets From Space, but it wasn’t until he founded his own production company to develop vehicles like Narc, that he once again won critical acclaim.
“I set it up with my then wife,” he recalls.”And it was mainly about getting better material. By then I’d had such an up and down career. For the first 10 years I didn’t even have a publicist. Boy, was I dumb.”
He married actress Michelle Grace in 1997 though sadly, the couple split in 2004. The pair remain close and he clearly dotes on Karsen, his eight-year-old daughter.
“I’m not a person with nannies,” he says. “I know a lot of people in Hollywood who keep their distance from their children. But I’m not one of them. I’m really hands on with my daughter. I love helping her with her homework. I love that I’m there when some kid has picked on her at school even though it makes me feel worse than anything else in the world. There’s this one little girl at school who has it in for Karsen. She’s probably jealous or isn’t too comfortable under her own skin yet. But when I’m dropping off or picking up and I see her ignoring my kid, it’s terrible. I want to go after an eight-year-old!”
That naughty little girl had best start checking under her bed for Henry Hill.
Wild Hogs is released April 19.