Liam Neeson may have gained pop-culture immortality for his gravelly growl of a certain line of dialogue in the 2008 hostage thriller Taken – “I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills” – but the release of his new film, a reboot of the classic spoof cop movie The Naked Gun represents another remarkable turn in Neeson’s distinguished career, which has taken in heavyweight prestige dramas, historical biopics, blockbusting science fiction, superhero epics and head-cracking action cinema.
In The Naked Gun, Neeson has for the first time taken the lead role in an out-and-out comedy. He plays Frank Drebin Jr, the police-detective son of Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin in the original. Created by the celebrated comedy team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, The Naked Gun was released in 1988, with Nielsen featuring in two sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear from 1991 and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994, as well as the preceding TV series Police Squad!, which aired in 1982. Neeson’s intense, unflappable acting style has been acclaimed by critics as a perfect match for Nielsen’s celebrated stone-face delivery; the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw said that Neeson “deadpans it impeccably”, while the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin writes that Neeson “delivers his dialogue with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds its lunacy”.
At the age of 73, Neeson’s current status as the star of a hit mainstream comedy – augmented by rumours of a romance with his co-star Pamela Anderson – is a world away from his emergence as a bona fide leading man in the early 1990s, when he put his teenage proficiency in boxing to good use in the Scotland-set drama The Big Man, bagged an Oscar nomination for playing Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, and nobly donned plaid, kilt and sporran as 18th century highlander Rob Roy.
Neeson’s ability to project a weighty sense of gravitas in these wildly differing roles was compounded by his casting as Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, in Neil Jordan’s 1996 biopic, the most politically sensitive – and closest to home – of his early leading roles. Born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, Neeson was raised Catholic but later said he was, ironically, inspired to become an actor after watching the firebrand Protestant leader Rev Ian Paisley preach, saying: “It was incredible to watch this 6ft-plus man just bible-thumping away.”
Neeson’s career took its first unexpected deviation in the late 1990s when he was cast as Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’s return to the Star Wars universe in 1999, with Lucas describing Neeson as “a master actor, who the other actors will look up to”. This excursion into fantasy-blockbuster moviemaking was cemented with a role as principal antagonist Ra’s al Ghul in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005, and lending his voice to Aslan the lion in the three Narnia films from the same period: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Neeson’s standing in the industry also allowed him to take smaller roles in landmark films in the same period, including Gangs of New York and Love Actually.
He had, however, lost his leading-man status in Hollywood, and it was the success of Taken – a French production, written by Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel – that returned him to the spotlight. Neeson later said he was “stunned” by its impact, adding: “I really thought it would be kind of a little side road from my so-called career. Really thought it would go straight to video.” Taken’s box office receipts amounted to nine times its $25m (£19m) budget and virtually inaugurated the “dad action” movie, thrillers featuring leads in late middle age; it is also the film with which Neeson is arguably now most identified with. Neeson went on to make a string of dad action films, including Unknown, Non-Stop, The Ice Road and Retribution.
Neeson’s reinvention as an action star coincided with a period of personal tragedy, after the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, in a skiing accident in 2009. The pair had met in 1993 while co-starring in a Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie, and married a year later. Neeson later said that grief over her death was partly responsible for his withdrawing from the lead role in Steven Spielberg’s biopic of Abraham Lincoln, released in 2012, in which he was replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis.
More recently Neeson was heavily criticised, and subsequently apologised, for saying that, in his youth, he had gone out looking to “kill” a random black man in revenge for a sexual assault on a friend. Neeson had mentioned the incident in 2019 during the press tour for another action film, Cold Pursuit, later saying: “The horror of what happened to my friend ignited irrational thoughts that do not represent the person I am. In trying to explain those feelings today, I missed the point and hurt many people.”
Neeson’s career, however, appears to have been relatively unaffected by the controversy, as well as his comment in 2018 that the recent wave of sexual misconduct allegations in the entertainment industry was “bit of a witch-hunt”. With The Naked Gun commanding significant media attention – as much for speculation on Neeson’s personal life as for the film itself – the actor’s stock is as high as it has ever been.