Goodfellas is a 1990 American biographical gangster film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese, and produced by Irwin Winkler. It is a film adaptation of Pileggi’s 1985 nonfiction book Wiseguy. Starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, and Paul Sorvino, the film narrates the rise and fall of mob associate Henry Hill and his friends and family from 1955 to 1980.
Once Robert De Niro agreed to play Jimmy Conway, Scorsese was able to secure the money needed to make the film. Ray Liotta, who played Henry Hill, had read Pileggi’s book when it came out and was fascinated by it. A couple of years afterward, his agent told him Scorsese was going to direct a film adaptation. In 1988, Liotta met Scorsese over a period of a couple of months and auditioned for the film. He campaigned aggressively for a role, though Warner Bros. Pictures wanted a well-known actor; he later said, “I think they would've rather had Eddie Murphy than me.” Scorsese cast Liotta after De Niro saw him in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986); Scorsese was surprised by “his explosive energy” in that film. Al Pacino and John Malkovich were considered for the role of Conway, and Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Val Kilmer, and Tom Cruise were considered for the role of Hill.
“We were thinking about just a few actors to play Henry Hill, and Ray was one of them,” Martin Scorsese recalled why he cast Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. “I had one concern. I knew that he could handle a role like the one he had in Something Wild, but here he would have to carry the whole picture. He had to look like he could have come out of that world, he had to have a certain innocence, he had to have authority, but most of all he needed charm as a counterweight to the violence and the horrifying behavior. I loved Ray’s work, we got along very well whenever we met and I knew we could work together.”
According to an article published on Theweek, Henry Hill, the real-life inspiration for Ray Liotta’s character in the movie, expressed his gratitude to Liotta by saying, “Thanks for making me not look like a scumbag.”
Liotta, who portrayed Henry Hill in the film, shared that the director didn’t want him to meet Hill during the filming process. However, after the movie was completed, Liotta received a call to meet Hill at a bowling alley in the California valley, accompanied by his brother. Liotta described his encounter with Hill, stating, “So I go to the bowling alley and there's Henry — I knew him from pictures.”
In this meeting, it is implied that Henry Hill expressed his appreciation to Ray Liotta for the way he portrayed him in Goodfellas, indicating that Liotta’s portrayal presented him in a more favorable light than he expected.
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