Ray Liotta honored by his ‘Cocaine Bear’ co-star Alden Ehrenreich: ‘He was so powerful’
Alden Ehrenreich lived a few blocks away from Ray Liotta and would see the iconic “Goodfellas” star around town. So you can imagine the kick Ehrenreich got out of playing his son in a movie decades later – a movie co-starring a coked-up bear, no less.
“It was nice to kind of talk about that,” Ehrenreich, 33, says of the late Liotta, who had one of his final roles in their dark comedy “Cocaine Bear” (in theaters now). “He was really sweet. The opportunity to work with him was really special and now I’m even more grateful for it.”
Liotta died in his sleep last May while in the Dominican Republic filming the movie “Dangerous Waters.” The 67-year-old actor, who brought a baseball legend back to life in “Field of Dreams” and became famous for his gangster and tough-guy roles, had just finished his work in “Cocaine Bear” as Syd, a St. Louis drug kingpin who travels to Georgia to repossess a bunch of missing Colombian coke found by a hungry black bear.
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In an interview with Newsweek in 2021, Liotta called the film “kind of nutty.” He also loved the title: “I go, ‘Cocaine Bear? What the fudge?’ ”
Director Elizabeth Banks tells USA TODAY that she saw Liotta eight days before he died when he came in to record dialogue during post-production. He told Banks about venturing to the Dominican Republic for his new film and his summer travel plans, but also got to see the computer-generated Cocaine Bear for the first time.
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Ehrenreich was excited to just do a couple of scenes with Liotta. “I grew up watching him, but you get this firsthand experience of the feeling that comes off onscreen. He was so powerful,” says Ehrenreich, whose mom was pregnant when she saw “Field of Dreams” and liked the name of the film’s director, Phil Alden Robinson, for her baby boy.
We hope you’re ready for the ‘Citizen Kane’ of coked-out animal movies