The last time movie tough guy Ray Liotta was in a fight was: a) When he and the elephant Tai got into a shoving match on the set of “Operation: Dumbo Drop”; b) at the premiere of “Corrina, Corrina,” when he walloped Whoopi Goldberg for hogging the cappucino machine; c) in a bar, when a rowdy patron said, “C’mere, Mr. Maniac. I’ll take you on”; or d) on the playground in 7th grade.
Surprisingly, the answer is “D.” Liotta made his mark as violent psychos in “Something Wild” and “GoodFellas,” and he returns to that vein in “Cop Land,” which opened last week.
But the soft-spoken actor insists he’s a pussycat.
“I know what the overall perception of me has been, but I’ve only been in one fight in my whole life,” he says. “I’m a pretty quiet person. I definitely let off steam, but in terms of going around bullying people, I couldn’t be farther from that.”
Liotta comes off as a genuine guy with a good sense of humor about himself. He says the scary rep is ironic because he mostly appeared in musicals in college and because his first big break was as a softy on the soap opera, “Another World.”
“For two years, I played the nicest guy in the world — never fought, nice to his mother, wasn’t one of those fool-arounds. So it’s interesting that the bad guys stand out in people’s minds,” he said.
“Cop Land” may or may not change that. Liotta plays a police officer who lives in a corrupt New Jersey town that has become an enclave for policemen. They rule the place but, during the course of the movie, a sheriff played by Sylvester Stallone tries to show Liotta what the corruption has wrought.
“Cop Land” has been eagerly anticipated since its high-voltage cast, which also includes Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo and Annabella Sciorra, came together last year.
“You never know how a movie will turn out, but I’ve been lucky,” says Liotta. “This one, I read the script and it was interesting, and then, all of a sudden, you heard about all these people getting cast.
“I mean, when I heard about Stallone, I thought, `Smart career move for him, but he’s not the person I’d put in this film.’ But he really does pull it off. And everybody else is so solid that I knew I’d be working with good actors.”
Refreshingly, Liotta doesn’t ante up the tired old actor story about how he researched his role by hanging out with officers on their rounds.
“I’m realizing now that all the information you need is in the script,” says Liotta. “When I played a heart surgeon, I went to all these surgeries and I actually got to touch a human heart, and when I played a coroner, I went to the morgue and looked at all the dead bodies.
“The thing is, before you do a movie, you have a lot of time and it’s fascinating to do the research, but I don’t know how helpful it is when it comes to your performance.”
Liotta also doesn’t trot out the we-were-one-big-happy-family stories about life on the “Cop Land” set. The cast is practically a reunion of actors who have worked on Martin Scorsese films, but Liotta says they didn’t schmooze.
“You’d be surprised how little camaraderie there is on a movie set,” he says. “I just finished a movie called `Phoenix’ with Anthony LaPaglia, Jeremy Piven and Anjelica Huston, and it was one of the best experiences I’ve had, in terms of hanging out together and having fun. But, on `Cop Land,’ the only person I did any hanging with was Sly, because we had so many scenes together and we liked each other. Everybody else kind of went off into their trailers.”
He plays a possibly bad cop — again — in “Phoenix,” so it’s not likely to do much to change his image. And neither is a feature story in last month’s “In Style” magazine.
“That was totally weird,” says Liotta. “I really did the story for my wife, because she did such a great job decorating the house. And the method to the madness was to show that I don’t live in some dark dungeon — the house is relaxed, it’s big, it’s soft.
“But I’m not pleased with the way the piece turned out. The woman who wrote it didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and the story wasn’t very accurate. She wrote that we never have people over, which isn’t true, and that I removed my wife’s doll collection from the kitchen, which isn’t true.”
What is true is that Liotta is happy with “Cop Land” and that, unlike some of his other films, he has actually seen it. (He played Shoeless Joe Jackson in “Field of Dreams,” but he’s probably the only man in America who never saw it.)
“I really enjoyed watching this movie. It reminds me of those movies from the ’70s. In fact, Serpico — the real Serpico — was at the screening, and he said that if he saw my character on the street, he’d arrest him right away,” says Liotta.
And if he did, Liotta would undoubtedly go quietly, without putting up a fight.
