With his broad trajectory and catalogue of more than 100 Hollywood films, Liam Neeson is arguably as interesting as any actor today. Photo / Getty Images
The 73-year-old actor stars in the reboot of The Naked Gun as he reboots his career by venturing into slapstick comedy.
There’s a line from Anthony Hopkins that Liam Neeson likes to share. Any time Neeson asks him how he’s doing, Hopkins tells him, “Great. I haven’t been found out yet.”
At 73, Neeson feels like he hasn’t been found out yet either. Once dubbed the heir apparent to Sean Connery’s sweeping romantic grandeur, Neeson, with his broad trajectory and catalogue of more than 100 Hollywood films, is arguably as interesting as any actor today. He can claim awards bait with Schindler’s List and Michael Collins, franchise blockbusters with Star Wars Episode I — The Phantom Menace and Batman Begins, and fan favourites with Love Actually and The Lego Movie. And that’s before you consider the long list of action-film ass-kickers this Oscar- and Tony-nominated star has played, which established his identity for a generation of fans. That’s largely thanks to the surprising success of the Taken franchise, built around Neeson as a father with a very particular set of skills who will find you and kill you if you kidnap his daughter. It has been a career that has kept him and his viewers guessing at what might come next.
“I’m honestly not trying to change,” he said of all the changes. “It wasn’t deliberate, but there’s been a lot of this for me.”
Neeson says this inside the third-floor screening room at Paramount’s building in Times Square on a humid Tuesday afternoon in July. If you haven’t figured out why you can’t escape his face lately, it’s part of his next change: he is starring in The Naked Gun, the reboot of the crime-spoof comedy franchise from the ’80s and ’90s. The film will serve as a test for whether the brand of straight-man intensity that made Neeson an action-film favourite can translate to the level of laughs produced by Leslie Nielsen, his predecessor in the trilogy. (Neeson is playing Nielsen’s son, Frank Drebin jnr, in the film, which also stars Pamela Anderson and Paul Walter Hauser.)
“Liam is probably the only actor alive who in the 21st century could play Frank Drebin,” Seth MacFarlane, producer of The Naked Gun, said, noting that Neeson is a throwback to performers such as Nielsen, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. “These were people who all had that gravitas that when you had them saying absurd things, it was just priceless since there was so much weight to what they were saying. We don’t make those kinds of actors in Hollywood anymore.”
His turn in The Naked Gun is arguably Neeson’s biggest leap back into the mainstream since the Taken trilogy concluded more than a decade ago. His career in the past 10 years has largely been marked by action movies that you might not know existed and apologising for comments in 2019 about once having had the “primal urge” to hurt a black man after a woman close to him told him she had been raped by a black man. (He later appeared as a fictionalised version of himself on the FX series Atlanta to touch on the controversy.)
So, in a summer of blockbusters dominated by superheroes and dinosaurs, are audiences ready to laugh with Neeson, who admits, “I don’t think of myself as funny-funny, but I love laughing and gagging about.” Can one of Hollywood’s most malleable talents resurrect the notion that there can be a successful theatrical comedy?
“Without getting into politics and stuff, we’re all living in a culture, a society where we’re scared to speak and scared if we don’t. That’s what I feel. And we need the Dave Chappelles, we need the Ricky Gervaises, we need the Robin Williamses to make fun,” Neeson said. “That’s why they have gargoyles in cathedrals, to remind us, ‘Come on, don’t take yourself too seriously.’
“The film is a giggle, and we need that, I think.”
As a teenager in Northern Ireland, Neeson had two passions – acting and boxing. At 11, he acted in his first school play in the hope of impressing a girl named Elizabeth, a gorgeous classmate with skin like porcelain.
“She was not impressed,” he remembered.
At 16, he took a serious left jab to the head that eventually made him stop fighting altogether. This physique he built over years in the gym was put to the test when he left university before finishing his degree and took a job as a forklift driver for Guinness.
“He was in imposing shape, but he was a very, very gentle soul and was quiet by nature, which belies the fact that he plays all these tough guys now,” said actor Ciaran Hinds, who first met Neeson when they were about 18 during a theatre trip to Holland for young Irish actors. “He had a yearning to act.”
As Neeson and I talked on that Tuesday afternoon, we were just a block away from where his life was changed forever in two different ways more than three decades ago.
The first is the intersection of Broadway and West 45th St, where Neeson starred in the 1993 revival of Anna Christie. His co-star was Natasha Richardson, whom he married the next year and with whom he had two sons, Micheal and Daniel. Richardson, who died in 2009 at the age of 45 because of a traumatic brain injury from a skiing accident, comes up in conversation unprompted from time to time.
Almost whispering to describe that period when they shared the stage, Neeson said, “It was great doing it every night with her and falling in love.”
The other thing? That same Broadway show sealed the deal on Steven Spielberg’s offering him the role of Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, for which he received an Oscar nomination for best actor. The role launched Neeson to new levels of fame, but it didn’t stop him, forever his own critic, from thinking that maybe someone else would have been better.
“A lot of times, I could see myself acting. Up until quite recently, I’d always think that we should have cast this or that actor,” he said. “I just see myself acting, and I didn’t like that.”
In the 15 years after Schindler’s List, Neeson changed again, this time with a little action film he thought for sure would be a straight-to-video release and a good excuse for him to dip into his amateur boxing repertoire from his teenage years in Ireland. It was called Taken.
Then, out of nowhere, Taken became the role that defined him.
“I was a tiny bit embarrassed,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong – I did love the script. But I can’t tell you how many voicemails [of the Taken speech] I’ve recorded for my sons’ friends.”
To this day, Neeson still doesn’t like to watch himself. He saw a cut of the film a few weeks ago and enjoyed some of the scenes, even if he still doesn’t know how they will play in front of an audience. Asked about what he thinks of his own performance, he’s harsher on himself, contorting his face into a half-grimace.
“I thought I was OK, seriously,” he said, repeating himself. “I thought I was OK.”
Then, in that voice and with that deadpan look, he turns his head and asks a question of his own.
“Did you get a couple of giggles?”
And again, Neeson made me laugh.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Timothy Bella
Photographs by: Geordie Wood
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