Action hero Liam Neeson is happy to play laid-back detective in Marlowe
Liam Neeson’s latest film, Marlowe, is the 100th of his career, but the Taken star is still getting action scripts.
Within seconds, Liam Neeson is talking about social media and his distrust of the internet. He is not, it is fair to say, a fan of TikTok.
“What’s safe?” he asks.
Neeson may not be on TikTok but he still reaches every morning for his “bloody phone”. He sighs. “I hate that about myself.”
The conversation winds randomly. Soon, he is talking about his childhood in Northern Ireland and dear old Mr Nesbitt who lived up the street.
“He served in the Somme,” says the actor, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Twice. It still breaks my heart. That quiet, wee man. The stuff he must have seen.”
Neeson has a lot of stories, and the answer to every question veers off somewhere unexpected.
His latest film, Marlowe, is the 100th in a career that has scaled the heights – Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Scorsese’s Silence – and plumbed the depths (the ghastly Star Wars prequels). Somewhere in between is his turn as a grieving husband in Love Actually and a vengeful father and husband in the Taken franchise.
Settling down in a London hotel, in theory to talk about Marlowe, the latest take on Raymond Chandler’s no-nonsense detective, he agrees, in his soft purr, that it is nice to have a mystery story in a world with so little mystery left. He complains about press junkets, despite currently being in one. “They want to know everything,” he says about journalists. “I like to keep something in reserve.”
At least, he does these days. In 2019, having gone off on another tangent, Neeson told a journalist that, 40 years previously, a friend had been raped by a black man. This led to him walking around armed with a cosh, hoping to meet a black person “so that I could kill him”. In the interview, Neeson had hoped to set off a discussion about personal growth. Instead he got outrage.
While he does not want to talk about it again, a year ago he appeared as himself in the US sitcom Atlanta, Donald Glover’s award-laden satirical look at race, sitting in a bar called Cancel Club, talking to black actor Brian Tyree Henry about “his transgression”. At least Neeson no longer hates black people, Henry says in the show. “What? No! I can’t stand the lot of you,” he responds.
What has been the reaction? He turns the question round, having avoided looking online: “What has been the reaction?” Well, there has been surprise. Admiration. Pleasure in knowing grown-ups can have a conversation rather than just cancelling everyone. “I love it,” Neeson says of the part. “They assured me, coming from the black community, that it was going to be cool. I thought, ‘I trust you’.
“I asked Donald, ‘When you were growing up and walking back from the club, surely the police stopped you? How did you feel?’ He said: ‘We just laughed.’ That’s always the saving grace.”
Compared with that furore, Marlowe is a cinch, something middlebrow and fun. When Neeson was growing up – he was born in Ballymena in 1952, the third of four siblings, to a cook mother and a caretaker father – film noir was always on the telly. Neeson brought to the film his memories of Sundays spent watching characters decked out in trench coat and trilby.
The Hollywood-set film also reminds him of arriving in Los Angeles in 1988 and driving his “rent-a-wreck” to the studios. But his new film also hints at the end of a career.
The key to Hollywood is knowing when your time is up, one character says. Does Neeson think about that?
“I’m going through it,” he says, serenely. “I turned 70 last year and if I’m sent an action script, I’ll call up my agent and say, ‘Do they know what age I am?’ People say I do my own stunts. I do not. But look, the dollar amount is very pleasing. And I’m not getting any younger.”
Which takes us to Taken, the 2008 film that changed Neeson’s life and featured the immortal line, growled by his tough-guy-dad character down the phone to his daughter’s kidnappers: “What I do have are a very particular set of skills.” The film cost $US25m and made $US226m at the box office. “I was convinced it would go straight to video,” laughs Neeson. “Then it became successful. I had a blast making it. I’d just turned 55.”
It led to more films in which Neeson seeks justice with a gun – Unknown, Taken 2, Taken 3, Run All Night, the list goes on. There is a lot of death.
Does he think about links between violence on screen and in real life? “It’s very much an American problem – that Second Amendment,” he replies. “And, OK, I’ve made a few violent films and used a gun quite a few times, but, speaking for myself, I grew up surrounded by violence. Certainly from 1969 onwards.” He grew up Catholic in a largely Protestant town during the Troubles.
“And I grew up with matinees,” he says. “Cowboys slaughtering Indians and vice versa. I loved having a toy gun but was never drawn to think, ‘I wonder what it’s like to shoot with a real gun?’ But gun violence in the US is staggering. A few weeks ago, a six-year-old shot his teacher.” Does it make him reconsider violent films? “It gives me pause for thought, yes,” he says.
Neeson could have been James Bond. He was in the running in the early 1990s, after the success of Schindler’s List, though Pierce Brosnan was eventually cast. He told Barbara Broccoli, who controls the 007 franchise, that he would be “very interested”. What would he have brought to the role? “I’d have been tempted to start speaking like Sean Connery,” says Neeson, speaking like Sean Connery.
He would have been terrific. But his girlfriend, actor Natasha Richardson, was reluctant because of all the “gorgeous girls in various countries getting in and out (Bond’s) bed”. She told him if he took the part he could forget about getting married. The couple wed in 1994 and had two sons, Micheal and Daniel, and Neeson used to hum the Bond theme at home to wind his wife up. Richardson was killed in a skiing accident in 2009.
Micheal is also an actor – he goes by Richardson and starred with Neeson three years ago in Made in Italy, a film about a father bonding with his son after the death of his wife – and Daniel is in fashion. This being the year of the “nepo baby”, how does Neeson feel about the furore? Neeson says his son had no choice.
“I have said to Micheal, ‘How much do you want to do this? What would you do if you couldn’t do it?’ If he says a teacher … be a teacher. The answer I want is, ‘I’ll crawl up and die if I can’t act’.”
Then he is off on a fresh tangent. About a Hollywood agent who wondered how Neeson, with his accent, was going to play the German businessman Oskar Schindler. He joked with them he would play the role with an Irish brogue.
What did he think of criticism of Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel for making stereotypical comments about the Irish?
“I heard he was being a bit racist,” says Neeson. “Jokes about Irish fighting, drinking and all that.” He pauses, perhaps thinking about that other time he was on a junket and it went a bit wrong. “I don’t know what to say.”
The Sunday Times
Marlowe opens in cinemas on May 18.
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