10 Actors Who Turned Down Iconic TV Roles For Stupid Reasons
5. Ray Liotta - Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
What do you picture when you think of Ray Liotta? If you've seen the guy's films and even if you only know the name, chances are you only think of one thing: an on-screen gangster. After all, his opening line in Goodfellas (1990) is one of the greatest in cinema, and since then his entire image seems to have formed around that one role.
As it turns out, Liotta didn't get the memo about what people thought of him, because when he got a call offering him the role of TV icon Tony Soprano, he turned it down because he didn't want to be typecast as a gangster.
Since The Sopranos took over peoples' TVs to become perhaps the greatest TV show of all time, Liotta has both tried and failed to shed his on-screen image, to little effect. Many of his post-Goodfellas roles see him portraying police officers, but never good up-standing ones.
Rather, he's maintained his hard gangster image from Goodfellas, and taken to playing corrupt cops instead of your typical mobster.
Given how enormous The Sopranos proved to be and how people perceive his on-screen persona, it could be that Liotta has come to regret such a career move.
He has since been cast in The Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark (2021), so at least he's getting his name in the franchise after all.