EXCLUSIVE: Ray Liotta Enjoyed Getting Beaten Up In 'Killing Them Softly'

by UInterviewOctober 9, 2012, 12:00 amNews >

Ray Liotta, 57, has had his share of playing bad guys — even likable ones, as in 1990's Goodfellas about the life of mobster Henry Hill — but it was a slightly different experience playing the victim, as he does in the upcoming Killing Them Softly, written and directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and also starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Sam Shepard about a heist that goes down during a mob-protected poker game.

"Usually I’m the guy running around beating people up and this time it happened to me," Liotta said when he sat down exclusively with Uinterview to talk about Killing Them Softly. "So it’s different in that sense. I guess I’m just a guy who watches over a card game. Pretty much everyone else are murderers," he pointed out, including costars Gandolfini and Pitt. "Brad’s a hit man, Gandolfini’s a hit man. The other two, I’m sure if they weren’t beating people up, they were killing people. So in that sense it was different."

The names associated with Killing Them Softly had a lot to do with Liotta's decision to sign on to the project. "I’m just working with people who I admire and happy to be in their company. But it was a chance to work with Andrew. I had met him before I’d seen a lot of his work and I dug it. I like the fact that Brad and Dede [Gardner] were the producers of it, and they’re serious about making good movies."

Read the full interview here.

Watch a trailer for Killing Them Softly, which hits theaters on November 30, 2012, here: