From Something Wild to Goodfellas and this year’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Ray Liotta has played a lot of crazy, criminal and disreputable characters — but he’s also played his share of decent characters, too.
One of the most decent of them all is Reece Wade, a preacher who adopts a boy at the height of the Great Depression and watches his son grow up to choose music over the ministry in The Identical, the latest film to be pitched to the “faith-based” market.
The film opens this weekend, and I had a chance to speak to Liotta over the phone. Here is an edited transcript of our interview.
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How did you get involved with this film?
Liotta: Actually it simply was offered to me. They sent me the script. It came late, I had fallen asleep, I woke up, remembered the script was out there, went down and got it, couldn’t fall back to sleep, decided to start looking at it, and I couldn’t put it down. I just loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved every character. There are some issues that I related to that made it personal for me, though I don’t usually look for that, but it just so happened that there was.
Can you talk about what those issues were?
Liotta: Yeah, I’m adopted, and in this show, my character — I’m a preacher — my wife and myself, played by Ashley Judd, we adopt a kid because a family had twins and they could hardly afford anything, because it starts in the Depression and goes through the ’70s. So that issue really hit me hard as it does to Blake’s character [Ryan Wade, the adopted son played by Blake Rayne].
Now the biggest difference is I knew about it — my parents told me I did a report about it in kindergarten for show and tell — whereas this character doesn’t realize he’s adopted at all, and finds out about it much, much later in his life. So it was really shocking for him, he really needs to kind of put that together. I’m of the ilk that it’s always good to let a kid know if they are adopted, let them know as soon as they can start understanding it, or even before. So this was very different in that sense.
This seems like a very different kind of role for you, playing a preacher, and not one of those negative horror-movie preachers, but a guy who seems like a really decent person.
Liotta: Oh, that’s one of the reasons why I loved it. No, no, this is a man who is very, very serious about his preaching, his belief in God, his wanting to spread the word, his wanting to help other people. It’s almost to the point where– Part of the movie is me wanting my son to follow in my footsteps, and I think the one error that he, my character, eventually learns is that everybody needs to find their own way. You can’t make a kid do something that you want to do, and you have to kind of let everybody develop their own interests in their life. You can’t subject yourself on them.
Was that part of the appeal of the role for you, getting to play somebody who’s kind of different from the Goodfellas or Sin City kind of characters that you’ve played?
Liotta: Yeah, I mean, I’ve done movies like Dominick & Eugene and Corinna Corinna, just a couple months ago I did a movie with the Muppets. I’ve played my share of nice guys, but the bad guys just seem to stand out in people’s minds! And I think that’s true for most actors who’ve played good guys and bad guys, you usually remember the bad. It’s much more dynamic, sometimes it’s scary. I just finished a western, I’ve been trying to do as many different parts as I can. It’s a very, very hard business, and sometimes it’s hard to stop on a dime and change things, but if you stick to it, eventually it comes about, as long as you’re putting in the work.
What kind of research did you do for the role? Did you visit any tent evangelists or anything like that?
Liotta: Oh yeah. I watched a lot of Billy Graham. On YouTube, there’s just so many of his sermons, when he was younger to how he was older. And like this movie, I age in it — it covers, like, 40 years — so to watch Billy Graham, the fiery kind of preaching that he did in the beginning to how he was much more mellower but yet the message was getting across just as strong was very interesting to me.
And then we shot this down in Nashville, Tennessee, where there’s more churches than people. I mean, there’s just so many churches there in Nashville, and of all the different denominations, and I would go, different days of the week, and listen to mass, and listen to the sermons, and see how they were delivering, some were better than others, just like anything else, and whether it’s actors, or television people, plumbers, there’s good and there’s bad. So sometimes I learned just as much from somebody who wasn’t really getting their message across.
Did anything surprise you in the research? Anything that maybe came into the film that wasn’t there originally?
Liotta: Yeah, my faith is starting to come back a little more. I was brought up Catholic, and there were certain dynamics of why I tended to get away from it, and I also read the Bible a lot, New Testament and Old Testament, and a lot of it is eye-opening, and it really is a guide of how to live your life, and you can sometimes have your cake and eat it too. And as I’m getting older– I know a lot of people find religion as they get older, for their fears alone. “If there really is a heaven and hell, I’d better hedge my bets!” But this part just opened up some things that were laying dormant.
How much of a challenge was it, playing someone who ages so much, roughly 40 years?
Liotta: I did it once before. I played Frank Sinatra in an HBO series, a movie called The Rat Pack, so it started with old Frank and then it went back to when he was beginning. Luckily, we didn’t use as many prosthetics. Personally, I just hate all the glue and the stuff they have to put on your face, but that being said, when it’s the right lighting and the right angles, you really do age. I thought they did a great job in this. It wasn’t over-the-top, it wasn’t too bizarre, it still looked like me, just an older version of me — which wasn’t fun to see!
I really loved the scene where your son basically tells you that he quit the seminary, and your acting in that scene in particular was really good. You can feel the frustration but you can also feel the love.
Liotta: Oh that’s great. I appreciate that, thank you.
What was it like working on a scene like that, with an actor like Blake who is brand new at the job?
Liotta: He was great. He really held his own. His character is on a journey, so in the beginning, when he’s not sure of himself, and me as his father is harping on what I want him to do, there was a– We developed a relationship before we started, and the great thing about acting is it’s just playing pretend. And kids do it the best, they do it totally committed to what they’re doing, they don’t care if anyone’s watching, and it’s basically the same thing with acting, and once you understand that mentality, it becomes a lot easier to do, and the more committed that I am in the scene, it forces him– I was listening to a thing about Michael Jordan the other day, there was an interview with him on the NBA network, and he said he became better when there were really good people around him or challenging him. And I think that’s true with acting. It happened for me when I was younger, and my first couple movies, and I think it worked for Blake.
When I spoke to Blake, he talked about how, when he was younger, he wanted to do high school drama and stuff but his parents wouldn’t let him because it wasn’t a job like becoming a doctor or whatever, he had to be on that track instead, and that’s a lot like his character. I’m curious about yourself. How was your own experience with parents either encouraging or discouraging that sort of thing?
Liotta: Mine were great. The only reason why I became an actor was because of my parents. What happened was, it came time to go to college. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was an average student. I walked out of my SATs. My dad said go to college, pick whatever you want. I got into the University of Miami because at that time, in the ’70s, you just needed a pulse to get in there. So I got into that, I was just going to take liberal arts. As I was in line for liberal arts, I finally got to talk to the person at the head of the line, and some of the subjects that I had to take — like math or history, I’m not sure what it was — I just didn’t want to do. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to do math and history again.
Right next to it, in registration, was for the drama department. I took a step over and said, “All right.” I had a drama class in high school. I just had a blast, and it was easy, and I didn’t take it very serious, and because I didn’t want to go to college but my parents said, “Go, go, take whatever you want,” I said, “Fine, I’ll be a drama major,” never thinking at all that I wanted to be an actor.
And it’s a typical story: there’s this cute girl in line, she said, “Are you auditioning for the play,” I said, “No,” she berated me, and I ended up auditioning and got in. I played a dancing waiter in Cabaret. And there was a great acting teacher there. But all of this happened because of my parents and their openness, no question about it. There’s no way this would have happened without my dad saying that.
That’s awesome.
Liotta: Yeah, it’s funny how things work out.
If there was one thing you wanted someone to take away from this film, what would it be?
Liotta: That they were entertained. It’s great if somebody learns something, it’s great if they can look at themselves about maybe being a parent that’s being too didactic in terms of telling their kids what they want them to do and how they should do it, and you just have to let people find themselves. But most of all, you just want people to be entertained. And I think this is a really great movie with a beautiful message.
This movie goes through a number of musical styles. Do you have a preferred style, or favorite style?
Liotta: Of music? I’m across the board. I gravitate more– I grew up more in the ’70s, so ’70s type music and movies. But I remember I was on a soap opera in the late ’70s, early ’80s, and I remember going to Studio 54, and sometimes if a good disco song comes on in my car, I’ll just be bopping and dancing along. So I’m pretty much across the board. I like a lot of different– My iPod is very eclectic.
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