Working as a movie actor is one of the most fiercely competitive professions in the world unless you're one of that handful of Alist actors who have the freedom to pick and choose at will. Even when an actor has established himself, it doesn't get any easier, says Ray Liotta, who made his mark in Something Wild and GoodFellas, and makes a comeback in the police corruption drama, Cop Land. "It's tough, it's horrible," says Liotta as he approaches his 42nd birthday next month. "And now it's based so much on how a movie does over its opening weekend at the box-office. That's terrible. But luckily for me, Cop Land has done well." Nevertheless, when I ask him what he plans to do next, he replies, "I'm just reading things now, and hoping."
Sitting in his London hotel suite last week, Liotta maintains eye contact throughout the interview, his penetrating gaze freed of the malevolent trappings which made it such an unsettling experience when employed so effectively to play villainous characters in Something Wild and Unlawful Entry. "Cop Land really put me back on the map once again," he says. "For a while there I was experimenting for the sake of it, but I doubt whether it's done me any good as an actor. I don't think it was a good career move." Written and directed by James Mangold, Cop Land is set in a New Jersey town which is home to a large number of New Yorker police officers - hence the town's nickname which gives the movie its title. Even though most of the cops are corrupt, they are admired by the town's sheriff, Freddy Heflin, whose own dreams of joining the NYPD were dashed by deafness in one ear, the result of a heroic underwater rescue he undertook in his teens. Bloated from booze, Freddy spends his days directing traffic and keeping an eye on the local kids while the NYPD officers spend their free time devising criminal scams.
When Ray Liotta's agent sent him the script of Cop Land, the actor immediately responded to the Freddy Helfin character. "At the time I thought they were doing this little independent picture," he says, "and I was willing to gain weight and all that. But they obviously had their sights set on someone else. I was one of the first people to meet Mangold and then I heard they were talking to other people and were interested in John Cusack."
To Liotta's amazement, the Freddy Heflin role finally went to Sylvester Stallone, who was seeking a break from action movies - and hoping to regain some respectability as an actor by playing such an unglamorous role. "I couldn't believe it," says Liotta. "I just thought, `Stallone!' I didn't know he wanted to turn things around in his work. When I met him he had gained the weight and had his character nailed right down. Now, having seen him working in the role, I just couldn't imagine anyone else doing it. Of course, other actors could have done it, but he brings a lot of attention to the movie."
It's not just Stallone's presence which draws attention to Cop Land - the stellar cast assembled by James Mangold includes Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Peter Berg, Cathy Moriarty, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Rapaport, Annabella Sciorra, Robert Patrick and Ray Liotta. "It was very jocky on the set," says Liotta, "like guys in the locker room, and loud. Peter Berg and those other guys were really into it and they had a nice camaraderie about them. I kept pretty much to myself because of what my character was."
Liotta plays the movie's most morally ambivalent character, Gary Figgis. "I saw him as someone who was going to be a good cop," he says, "and then he got caught up in wanting to belong with the cool guys led by Harvey Keitel. But he got used by them. So when we meet him first in the movie, he's extremely bitter, feeling really alienated by the other cops, drinking too much and being self-destructive." The New Jersey locations of Cop Land brought Ray Liotta - who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Michelle Grace and their four Shar Pei dogs - back to the state where he was born. "You know, they never show the beautiful side of New Jersey in the movies," he says. "It's always the butt of New York jokes, like Jersey's the ugly brother. From New York across the river, it looks so industrial and smoggy, but once you get further south and west it gets really beautiful. I love it. I grew up there and I've no qualms with it."
He was born in Newark and according to one reference book his father was Italian and his mother Scots-Irish. "Well, it was something like that," he says. "I'm not sure. I'm adopted." He was a high school basketball and soccer star but opted to major in drama when he enrolled at the University of Miami. On graduating, he moved to New York and within six months landed a recurring role in the daily soap, Another World - as Joey Perrini, "the world's nicest guy".
After three years in the soap he moved out west to break into movies, but the work was sporadic. He made his film debut down the credits of the trashy 1983 Harold Robbins adaptation, The Lonely Lady, which starred Pia Zadora, but he seems to have erased that movie from his memory and his potted biography. Instead he describes Jonathan Demme's hugely entertaining black comedy/thriller, Something Wild, which he made three years later, as his first feature film.
Liotta was beginning to despair when he heard about Something Wild. "I wasn't going to give up, but I was running out of money. I'd saved my money from the soap opera, but things just weren't happening. I'd done a couple of series here and there, and a couple of guest spots, but nothing I really wanted to do. "I heard about Something Wild from some guys in acting class. I called up my agent and asked if I could be seen for it. He said they'd almost finished casting, but somehow he found a way of finagling me into meeting the assistant or the secretary of the real casting people - they had just blown me off and were just doing a favour for my agent, I think. I got really upset by it, especially as I was doing a series at the time which had just gotten cancelled."
Liotta was aware that Melanie Griffith had already been cast in Something Wild and he decided to cut through the casting red-tape by contacting her directly. "She was married to Steven Bauer at the time and I'd gone to college with him," he says. "I called up Steven and asked to talk to Melanie. I knew she had some kind of casting approval on the movie. She said she would talk to Jonathan Demme, but he told her he'd already narrowed it down to three actors for the part I wanted. But Melanie just insisted, not because she believed in me, though - I think she just wanted to use her power."
His determination and perseverance paid off when he got the role, playing Griffith's menacing ex-lover, and his performance earned him fine reviews. He followed it with the sensitive family drama, Dominick And Eugene, with Tom Hulce, and then played the ghost of the baseball player, Shoeless Joe Jackson, in Phil Alden Robinson's wonderful Field Of Dreams. "Guys keep coming up to me to say how much they loved that movie and how they cried watching it," says Liotta. "I suppose it's the whole father-son thing, especially at that point where I say to Costner, `It's your dad'. It's very touching. When I first read it I thought it was just silly. I just didn't get it. I only came in for the last month of that shoot, which was all the scenes at the farmhouse. All I had to do was play baseball. I was thrilled to be working with Burt Lancaster, James Earl Jones, all those heavyweight actors, but I had no idea the picture would be so special to so many people."
Next came Martin Scorsese's brilliant, searing, factually-based mobster movie GoodFellas, in which Liotta vividly played the half-Irish, half-Sicilian gangster, Henry Hill - a role he won after an agonising year of waiting around. "I was one of the first people to read for it," he says, "but Marty took a long time getting it off the ground. Also, the studio wasn't willing to go with me at that time because I'd only done three movies and none of them was wildly successful. Luckily, as soon as Bob De Niro agreed to play the other main part the studio didn't care who played Henry Hill. Bob was their selling tool."
GoodFellas ends on one unforgettable, frantic day in the life of Henry Hill as his desperation rises with the pressures mounting upon him. "We took a couple of weeks to shoot that day," says Liotta. "There was a lot of driving involved, which takes time, and a lot of small scenes. I had great make-up people who gave me that really sweaty look and every day we were shooting that sequence I made sure I drank a lot of coffee - it revs you up and gets you edgy." The rampant corruption and lawlessness of the police officers in Cop Land recalls the gangster milieu of GoodFellas and suggests, as do so many other recent US movies, that corruption is now endemic in the American police system. "I think there's probably a smaller proportion of corrupt cops in the world than we see in the movies," Ray Liotta says. "Most movies are about climactic things in people's lives. I don't know how interesting it would be just to show a good cop on a good day, just going about his work and going home to his good wife. I don't think people would come out to see that."
I put it to Liotta that the narrative of Cop Land, and whole scenes in particular, evoke classic movie westerns. "That's what people have said," he responds, "but I haven't particularly seen that. Then again, I've never been big on westerns, but Mangold did see it like that. Maybe he stole some things from some westerns, I don't know."
Meanwhile, Ray Liotta has finished co-starring with Anjelica Huston in Phoenix, in which he plays a degenerate gambler who happens to be a cop. He gets himself into debt and robs a loan shark to pay off his bookie. Along the way he falls in love with the mother (Huston) of a young woman he tries to pick up. Phoenix is directed by the young Englishman Danny Cannon, who, I point out, had a fraught relationship with Sylvester Stallone on the set of Judge Dredd. "That's for sure," says Liotta, "but Sly was okay on Cop Land."
And Liotta can be seen in the recent video release, Turbulence, in which he plays an escaped serial killer who, along with a bank robber played by Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, is being transported across the US on a commercial flight when the bank robber attempts to hijack the plane.
"How's Brendan doing?" Ray Liotta asks. "He's a really good actor. Here was this really nice Irish guy transformed into this hulking Texan redneck. He did a great job."