When Paul Sorvino was offered the role of Queens underboss Paulie Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), he didn’t want to take it. First, he was a proud Italian-American. Connoisseur of Italian culture, especially food and music, he was not inclined to play a mobster. Also, Sorvino, who died Monday at age 83, was a fickle boy, and he liked to play fickle boys. Paulie was largely a brick. In the early scenes of the film, much is said about how most of the criminal’s directives were carried out with a simple nod of the head.
He accepted the role anyway and went into rehearsals. A few days before the shooting began, he called his agent and asked if he could post bail. At a 2015 panel at the Tribeca Film Festival commemorating the 25th anniversary of “Goodfellas,” Sorvino poked fun at people who complimented him on his “choices” in what became one of his emblematic roles. He scoffed at the idea of ”choices,” insisting, “I found the guy and the guy made the choices.”
“It was very difficult,” Sorvino told panel moderator Jon Stewart. “I’m a poet, I’m an opera singer, I’m an author … none of this is gangster.” But then, for Sorvino, came a moment. In his account in this panel, it was when he was straightening his tie. In other accounts, he was pulling a bit of spinach out of his teeth. In both versions, Sorvino was looking at himself in the mirror. And there was a fixed face that met him.
“I saw this guy.” And that was it.
Sorvino’s vision of Paulie was an incredibly nuanced portrait of a man who, on the page, appears as simple and unpleasant as sudden death. In “Wise Guy,” the nonfiction book that was the basis for “Goodfellas,” author Nick Pileggi wrote, “It was understood on the street that Paul Vario” (the mobster’s last name was changed to film) “led one of New York’s toughest and most violent gangs”. In the Brownsville-East New York area of the city, “the body count was always high, and in the ’60s and ’70s Vario’s thugs did most of the heavy-handed work,” Pileggi explained, and he added later: “There were always some. bosses to be beaten against picket lines, businessmen to be forced to make their loan payments, independents to be straightened out on the territorial lines, the possible witnesses to be killed and the pigeons to be buried”.
Vario, then, was an intermediate manager of chaos. Sorvino played him as a guy who kept his cool and tried to keep his subordinates in line.
Paul Sorvino (1939-2022)
The tough actor, best known for his role as mobster Paulie Cicero on “Goodfellas,” has died at age 83.
Much of “Goodfellas” (airing on HBO Max) is devoted to how three underlings, played by Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, failed to stay in line. Paulie can be a tolerant and caring “father”. Sorvino uses his natural warmth when he greets Jimmy (De Niro), the “good earner,” in a backroom casino early in the film. Later, overseeing elaborate prison dinners, he has a special system for chopping garlic, and once his cellmate Henry (Liotta) enters with wine and scotch, he proclaims, “Now we can eat.” Presiding over a celebration of Henry’s release from the set is Uncle Paulie.
But it’s when he plays brick that Sorvino kills. In that celebration, he takes Henry to the backyard. Henry had been dealing drugs in prison, with Paulie’s tacit approval. Now in straight face mode, Paulie tells Henry to “stay away from the trash.” When Henry makes a fool of himself, Paulie doesn’t. “Don’t make a fool of me. Just don’t.” Without losing any of the character’s external intonations, Sorvino cuts the words like he’s snapping his neck.
Henry and his merry men either honor Paulie with a percentage of his ill-gotten gains or lie to his face. These character dynamics are complicated: Paulie seems too sharp not to know he’s being tricked, but what can he do about it? One thing he can do is remove Joe Pesci’s Tommy from the group, using his brother Tuddy Cicero (Frank DiLeo) as a lethal proxy.
Paulie’s last words to Henry – “Now I have to turn my back” – are as chilling as any of the film’s most gruesome sights.
Sorvino’s decades-long career was compromised. One of his first major roles was as a male rape victim in a badly conceived 1974 ABC movie of the week called “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy.” In the 1974 version of “The Gambler” (available to rent or buy on major platforms) he played his first mob-adjacent character, a bookie named Hips, but that character wasn’t Paulie: He has an affection genuine personal for the main character. (James Caan), Hips’ most indebted and indebted client.
For another taste of Sorvino at his most voluble, his turn as Curtis Mahoney, a federal agent posing as an investigative reporter in Mike Nichols’ much-maligned 1974 “Dolphin Day” ( available at Kino Now). Far from a consummate mole, Mahoney is an overly chatty lunatic. Sorvino is also memorable as Edelson, the undercover cop commander Burns (Al Pacino) in William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980; rent or buy on major platforms). Assigning his underling to work in the underworld of Manhattan’s gay sex club in search of a killer, Edelson probes Burns’ sexual history with the most blunt, unflinching question imaginable.
Both before and after “Goodfellas,” Sorvino was a regular presence in pictures directed by and starring Warren Beatty, most recently “Rules Don’t Apply” (2016). Sorvino’s post-“Goodfellas” filmography oscillated between solid character roles in indies like James Gray’s “The Cooler” (2003) and “The Immigrant” (2014) and the usual acting dreck.
In 2018, the world learned how passionate Sorvino could be off-screen. In response to the revelations of abuse and blackball that her daughter, actor Mira Sorvino, suffered at the hands of disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein, Sorvino told TMZ that she hoped Weinstein would go to jail: “Because if not, must be known.” Sorvino then explained in no uncertain terms what would happen.
The role of a proud father driven to indignant and justified rage was one that suited this performer well enough. But you wish you hadn’t been forced to live it.
Glenn Kenny is a critic and author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas’.”