Ray Liotta has said that he once received a fake horse's head from Frank Sinatra's daughters after he declined to play the crooner in a TV miniseries they were making.
Speaking on Wednesday's episode of ''Jay Leno's Garage,'' the actor explained that he felt uncomfortable accepting the role. At issue was that he went on to star as Sinatra in the 1998 film ''The Rat Pack'' opposite Don Cheadle, Joe Mantegna and Angus Macfadyen.
''The daughters, they wanted me to do a miniseries when they were doing a miniseries about it and I just felt too uncomfortable,'' Liotta said, according to Yahoo Entertainment.
He received the strange package while filming ''The Rat Pack.''
''We were doing the movie, and I got delivered a horse's head,'' Liotta said. ''Obviously it wasn't a real one, but it was a horse's head. And, you know, a horse's head means you're toast.''
The act of sending a severed horse head was made famous by the hit film ''The Godfather'' and is meant to be a threat. In Liotta's case, it was a fake horse head, but the message was clear enough.
''It turned out that his daughters sent it and said, 'Oh, you could do this one, but you couldn't do the one that we wanted you to?''' he said.
Last month, Liotta joined dozens of other celebrities to react to the Alec Baldwin gun incident, which killed ''Rust'' cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza.
Since the shooting, top names have called for a move away from using real weapons, whether armed with blanks or bullets. Commenting on the ordeal, Liotta explained that checks on guns are usually extensive on film sets.
''They always — that I know of — they check it so you can see,'' Liotta said, according to Fox News. ''They give it to the person you're pointing the gun at, they do it to the producer, they show whoever is there that it doesn't work.''
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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