Goodfellas/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Danza: Paul Cícero, played by Paul Sorvino.
  • Dawson Casting: Joe Pesci was 46 at the time of filming and plays Tommy starting his early twenties.
  • Enforced Method Acting: A number of scenes are partially ad-libbed with actors not told beforehand
    • Specially relevant in the "I'm funny how?" one; Pesci and Liotta were instructed to improvise, other actors didn't know what was going to happen so their surprised-to-panicked reactions and puzzled faces are genuine. The scene mirrors what happened to Pesci in Real life; he told a mobster in a restaurant that he was funny and the mobster got angry. Scorsese implemented it once he learnt about it, as it wasn't in the book.
    • Scorsese also had all the actors involved in the kitchen scene (while Billy Batts was still in the trunk) simply improvise their dialogue for that sequence. The final scene with Spider was also ad-libbed, with the only scripted line being "Why don't you go fuck yourself?"
  • Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Mean Character, Nice Actor:
    • Joe Pesci had problems with the Spider scene because he couldn't understand the outrageous reaction of his own character.
    • Paul Sorvino almost walked out because he felt that he couldn't reach the cold personality of his role because he was the opposite kind of individual.

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