The time Ray Liotta destroyed Bradley Cooper

For nearly four decades, Ray Liotta has played some of the most intimidating and savage roles in cinema. Raised in a blue-collar New Jersey neighborhood, his background landed him roles in mobster movies and crime dramas like One of ours, Copland, field of dreams and Crossroad. In a new oral history of the actor’s life and work for esquirefriends, family, and co-stars (including Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Lopez, and Andy Garcia) tell how they met this “fucking guy.”

However, throughout his career, not everyone was prepared for Liotta’s intensity on set. As Beth Holden-Garland, Liotta’s manager for many years, recalls, there was a moment on the set of Crossroad in which Liotta had to get some of his toughness out before he started rolling. In the Derek Cianfrance-directed film, Ray Liotta played a detective named Peter Deluca, an “intimidating, dirty, very scary cop,” Holden-Garland recalls. There’s a scene where he has to blackmail Bradley Cooper’s character, and Cooper apparently “wasn’t quite scared.”

“Derek pulled Ray away and said, ‘I want you to really loosen up with him now. Tell him what you want,'” Liotta’s rep reveals. “Ray went up to Bradley and said, ‘You’re the luckiest actor in this town. You suck. Hangover II stinks’. She lashed out at him like it was nothing. Then Derek said, “Action!” And then they got the scene.” Cooper took the jokes like a champ, and Cianfrance came to love the fiery take. “Those moments on set that were so emasculating and humiliating,” the director shares in the same oral history, “I can tell Which are some of the best moments of my life.”