They are fully themselves, and able to reflect the difficulties of the films’ actual protagonists. In all three of his Scorsese movies, he’s adept at playing men who are unwilling, unable or unneeded to undergo a leading man’s change. No actor who takes 20-year breaks from cinema will seem like he has much to prove, but Pesci’s work in The Irishman does quietly show off his range: rather than the blustery, pugnacious bag man, he’s the gangster who exudes menace without raising his voice.

When Pesci returned to Scorsese in 2019, those impulses looked unexpectedly rational, if still sometimes pitiless. This is a man fully in control of his worst impulses. Moreover, there’s a grasping desire beneath Nicky’s ruthlessness that goes beyond a violent impetuousness. It is true that his Casino character, Nicky Santoro, shares Tommy’s hair-trigger temper – though the trigger is less literal, with tools as varied as a vice and a ballpoint pen. Pesci’s subsequent work in Casino was, along with the rest of the film, unfairly dismissed as Imitation Goodfellas at the time of its 1995 release. Yet even this unpredictability could be reframed as routine.

Photograph: Warner Bros/Barry Wetcher/Allstar Indeed, he doesn’t: another round of barroom joshing ends with Tommy murdering a lackey in cold blood. After a minute, Tommy relents, and everyone laughs about it, but the scene still feels like a warning from Pesci: don’t trust that this mouthy, magnetic guy is going to settle into comic relief.

In his most famous scene, Pesci essentially confronts the other characters over his own scene-stealing: “Funny how? What’s funny about it?” he demands to know when Henry tries to compliment him on a well-told story. As Tommy DeVito, Pesci plays volatile sideman to the more controlled burn of his frequent on-screen partner Robert De Niro, as well as the film’s younger narrator, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). Pesci’s Oscar for Goodfellas – as best supporting actor, naturally – was both a worthy recognition and a prelude to a pigeonholing, as Oscars so often are. The program is screening his less signature work from the 80s (Easy Money, Eureka), most of his Scorsese collaborations (Goodfellas, Casino and his one recent performance in The Irishman) and one genuine starring vehicle, which I’ll get to in a moment. That’s emphasized in Also Starring … Joe Pesci, a film series running at the Metrograph in New York this month, celebrating Pesci’s work primarily through his supporting performances. There’s no shame, however, in Pesci’s skill as a supporting player.

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