Ray Liotta Looks Back at ‘Field of Dreams’ in Lost Interview

Ray Liotta died in May 2022 and was best known for his role as Henry Hill in Goodfellas and Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. In August, Deadline published an interview with Liotta that took place a few years before his death, and he looked back at filming Field of Dreams, which is considered one of the best sports movies of all time. 

“For one thing, Shoeless Joe hit left-handed and threw right-handed,” Liotta explained. “I bat righty and I throw lefty. The director and the producers came down and they huddled up. They said they we going to flip [the negative] like they did when Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in the 1942 film Pride of the Yankees. But they didn’t, and we left it wrong. It was only my third movie, so I didn’t have the confidence to say no. Anyhow, it seemed fine, and then one night I’m watching Monday Night Baseball, and the announcer says, ‘I just saw Field of Dreams, and Shoeless Joe didn’t bat that way.’ [Laughs] Oh, f—.”

Liotta also revealed that he never saw Field of Dreams. “Because my mother had cancer, and I was in the middle of doing Goodfellas,” he said. “There was a screening one weekend. My dad and my mom came, and we were watching it, and she just started not feeling well. Her lungs started getting… She felt the fluid coming. She was having trouble breathing, so we just left. I don’t know why I’ve never seen it. It’s not like if I watched it, I’d cry. I mean, I’ve seen what I did, different clips, because for a while there, every paper was using it as Field of something… Whatever was going on in the government at one time or other. But that’s why I’ve never seen it.”

Field of Dreams was a critical and commercial success as it was nominated for three Academy Awards and made $84.4 million at the box office worldwide. Jackson was a baseball player who played in MLB from 1908 to 1920. For his career, Jackson had a .356 batting average and helped the Chicago White Sox win the World Series in 2017. But in 1920, Jackson was banned from baseball after the 1920 season for his association with the Black Sox scandal in which members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox participated in a conspiracy to fix the World Series. He died at the age of 64 in 1951.