Why Are All Our Favorite Hollywood Wise Guys Dying?

After actor Paul Sorvino’s death was announced by his family this week, a particular clip from Goodfellas began making the rounds on social media. In it, Sorvino’s flinty mafioso Paulie Cicero delicately slices a clove of garlic for a lavish prison dinner, using a razor blade to shave off slivers so thin as to be translucent.

“Paulie did the prep work,” Goodfellas protagonist Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, tells us in the clip’s voiceover. “He was doing a year for contempt and he has this wonderful system for doing the garlic.”

Liotta, of course, also died recently. On May 26, exactly two months ago, a rep for the actor confirmed that he had died suddenly in his sleep, aged 67. Then, on July 6 came the death of 82-year-old James Caan, the actor whose name is practically inseparable from The Godfather’s spitfire Sonny Corleone. Two days later, yet another blow: Tony Sirico, immortalized as Tony Soprano’s loyal, paranoid, tracksuit-sporting capo Paulie Gualtieri on The Sopranos, died at 79 years old.

And, just when it seemed like the rule of threes might hold, Sorvino died Monday. He was 83 years old.

Half of them Italian actors—Caan, a Jew from Queens, was frequently Italian-coded; as was Liotta, a Scotsman adopted by Italian-Scottish parents—beloved for playing mob-types, each death has compounded the monumental loss. What’s more, each new outpouring of grief has been accompanied by a growing sense of alarm. The true tough-guy character actor, always a rare breed, now seems in danger of true extinction. After Sorvino’s death, some social media users began calling, only half-jokingly, for Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Michael Imperioli to be hustled into an underground bunker.

How Great Was Ray Liotta? He Had Me at ‘Something Wild’

We’ll always have The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos. But the past two months have been a bittersweet reminder that the men who cemented what a Hollywood wise guy is won’t be with us forever, and that, after they’re gone, lifting from the rulebook they helped write will continue to be an imperfect science at best. (Looking at you, Gangster Squad, The Kitchen, and Gotti.)

The myth of the American mobster that Liotta, Sirico, Caan, and Sorvino helped cement is undeniably iconic. In their world, there are no good or bad guys, only guys to be rooted for or against. These guys are lovable and monstrous, often at the same time. They’re cool, competent, even aspirational. After The Godfather came out, real members of the Mafia began taking their cues on how to dress and act from the film, prizing their VHS copies like Bibles, in something author Diego Gambetta called “lowlife imitating art.”

Civilians were just as enamored. In 1990, the year Goodfellas hit theaters, a journalist somewhat worryingly mused: “Who among us, having been wronged, has not fantasized about calling upon brothers in blood to wreak suitable vengeance—an ice-picked body, perhaps, trussed like a turkey bobbing up somewhere?”

Sure. The point is: they helped print the legend, and everyone believed it. In fact, Liotta, Sirico, Caan, and Sorvino were among an irreproducible class of tough-guy actors who were almost too good at their jobs. All four made their most iconic roles feel so lived-in that fans, unable to separate the art from the artist, just assumed they were real gangsters. They were only fractionally right.

Sorvino, who was mistaken for a real-life wise guy for years after playing Cicero, once quipped to Ability Magazine, “I suppose that’s the price you pay for being effective in a role.” Of the four, it was Sorvino who was arguably the furthest from his best-known fictional counterpart. Post-Goodfellas, he talked openly about how much he had struggled to connect with Paulie Cicero’s “kernel of coldness and absolute hardness,” explaining to The New York Times in 1990 that it was “antithetical to my nature, except when my family is threatened.”

He had been in the process of begging his agent to get him out of his contract, Sorvino cheerfully related in a 2015 panel, when he suddenly found Cicero scowling back at him in the mirror. As he imitated the mobster’s heavy-lidded death glare to audience titters, panel host Jon Stewart commented, “It is frightening, when you guys go into it.”

“I’m sorry,” Sorvino replied, instantly switching back into teddy-bear mode. “I’m really a very soft guy.”

Those suspicious of that claim need only look to the 1996 Academy Awards, when his daughter, Mira Sorvino, won an Oscar for her performance in Mighty Aphrodite. As she thanked her father for teaching her “everything I know about acting,” a visibly moved Sorvino burst into tears. “Everyone thinks I’m a mobster,” he told the Times in 2006. “I think of myself as a warrior-poet.” A writer and sculptor who helped his other daughter, Amanda, run a horse rescue out of Pennsylvania, Sorvino was also an accomplished opera singer. He loved to sing, he said, because not only did audiences “get to hear my big voice, you get to feel my big heart.”

But when Amanda’s ex-boyfriend threatened to kill her in 2007, she called the police and then her father. Sorvino arrived first, packing a gun. And when Mira accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse in 2017, Sorvino said that the disgraced mogul better pray he go to jail. “Because if not,” he growled to TMZ, “he has to meet me, and I will kill the motherfucker.”

“Our hearts are broken,” Sorvino’s wife, Dee Dee, told the Associated Press on Monday, “there will never be another Paul Sorvino.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the most like his fictional counterpart was Sirico, whose fairly extensive rap sheet as a younger man destined him to be able to play Paulie Walnuts in his sleep, perfectly coiffed hair and all. Openly fascinated by the shady criminal types who hung around his Brooklyn neighborhood, Sirico was “a bitch of a kid to raise,” his mother recalled fondly to the New York Daily News in 2000. He soon fell in with “the wrong type of guys,” as he later put it, and did time behind bars before deciding to switch career paths.

“I got 28 arrests and only two convictions, so you gotta admit I have a pretty good acting record,” Sirico told the Los Angeles Times nearly a decade before The Sopranos first aired.

“Listen, Junior was a genuine tough guy,” Caan, who had known Sirico for years at that point, told the newspaper. “But in a funny way, now that he’s straight, he can behave like a wise guy. He’s been able to romanticize his past, throw in a few bangles and sparkles and use it as an actor. What you see is really him—he just adds a little pepper, a little cayenne, to spice it up.”

Caan himself was frequently mistaken for a real-life mobster. In 2009, he claimed to Vanity Fair that a country club once denied him membership on the basis that the board assumed he was “a made guy.” To be fair, while by all accounts not an actual mafioso, Caan was openly chummy with several suspected high-ranking members of the New York mob, one of whom he reportedly had to ask permission to play Sonny.

Of his class of fellow wise guys, Caan was the one who most fully transcended his typecasting. But although he moved on to the kinds of leading roles that allowed him to hit his stride as a man of unbearably ferocious sex appeal (and yes, that includes his turn in Elf), his origins remained embedded in his guts. After all, this was the man whose famous “bada-bing” exclamation from The Godfather was improvised, with the actor telling Vanity Fair that “it just came out of my mouth—I don’t know from where.”

Harder to place was Liotta, who claimed he was nothing like the parade of wise guys he was lauded for portraying over the years. Born in New Jersey and adopted out of an orphanage after being abandoned as an infant, Liotta identified as half-Italian, half-Scottish, because that’s what his adoptive parents were. But it wasn’t that assumed background that convinced director Martin Scorsese that Liotta was the right choice for Henry Hill.

Instead, it was Liotta’s instinctive edge, which reportedly emerged as Scorsese’s bodyguards attempted to manhandle the actor away from the director once, mistaking his greeting as an attack. “I think my initial reaction was, ‘Get your hands off me,’ acting like a tough guy, which I’m not,” Liotta said in 2015. Scorsese watched him with interest. “He said that’s when he knew.”

Like Hill, Liotta was a guy who just seemed to adore his job. “I live for the moment where you disappear and suddenly you’re not you anymore—you’re somebody else,” he once told film critic Matt Zoller Seitz. “That feeling you get when everything clicks. That rush.”

All of them—Liotta, Caan, Sirico, and Sorvino—knew that thrill. In a 1999 interview, Sirico recalled a suggestion he’d been given by an acting teacher after getting out of prison. “I was this 30-year-old ex-con villain sitting in a class filled with fresh-faced, serious drama students,” he said, when his coach “leaned over to me after I did a scene and whispered, ‘Tony, leave the gun home.’”

Sirico, to the great fortune of us all, never really took that advice. Neither did Liotta, Caan, or Sorvino. They kept their guns; they left us the cannoli.

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