One of the stars of 'Goodfellas' almost quit right before it started filming

Ian Phillips

Apr 27, 2015, 22:05 IST

In "Goodfellas," Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) is one of the most powerful gangsters in New York.

It's crazy to think that anybody who starred in "Goodfellas" would ever have wanted to quit.

However, that was almost the case for Paul Sorvino, who's performance as mob capo Paul "Paulie" Cicero, is perhaps the best-known of his entire career.

At a 25th anniversary celebration of "Goodfellas" at the Tribeca Film Festival over the weekend, Sorvino explained how he almost quit right before filming started.

"I was quitting after almost four weeks and we were supposed to start three days later and I called my manager and said, 'get me out of this, I can't do it,'" Sorvino said.

It might be surprising that Sorvino was having second thoughts about the role. His character of Paulie Cicero, based on real life mobster Paul Vario, has a lot in common with Sorvino. They are both middle-aged Italian-American men from New York, as Sorvino acknowledged. However, there was more to playing Cicero than just that.

Getty Images

Nicholas Pileggi, Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Robert De Niro, and Paul Sorvino discuss "Goodfellas" with Jon Stewart at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"The real difficulty there was the inner life ... that weird bifurcation of character," Sorvino said. "When they're home, they're family people. When they're out, they're shooting people."

While the three main characters in "Goodfellas" (Henry Hill, Jimmy Conway, Tommy DeVito) are portrayed as violent sociopaths, Cicero seems the most cautious of them all. After all, he is the only one who stayed away from drugs and won't do criminal transactions over the phone.

Warner Bros via YouTube

Sorvino didn't think he would be able to channel the inner life of a gangster.

The actors in the film had screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (who wrote the book "Wiseguy" on which the film was based) at their disposal to find out what the mobsters were like in real life. De Niro, who played Jimmy Conway, went so far as to find out how Jimmy the Gent held a ketchup bottle.