The actor Liam Neeson called the second coming of Shakespeare: “He was a genius”
For a very serious actor, one who was Oscar nominated for Schindler’s List, which is about as serious a movie as you can get no less, Liam Neeson does a lot of comedy very well indeed, as this year’s Naked Gun reboot showed.
What could have been a complete disaster given comedy is a difficult thing to do in this day and age without upsetting people, or at least a more challenging thing to do, turned out to be a well-reviewed masterstroke as Neeson, Pamela Anderson and director Akiva Schaffer combined to make a more than watchable update of the Leslie Nielsen classic.
But then anyone who remembers Neeson popping up on Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Life’s Too Short will know that the big Irishman has comic chops underneath that gruff “and I will kill you” exterior.
His ‘I have full blown AIDS’ cameo has gone down as one of the funniest moments from the Warwick Davis comedy as Neeson, playing it brilliantly straight as always, tries to roleplay his way into getting to do more comedy in his career to tumbleweed effect.
Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane acted as a producer on the new Naked Gun movie, and he cast Neeson on his movie A Million Ways to Die in the West back in 2014 and again in bear-comedy Ted 2, and Neeson also lent his voice to fine comic effect on The Lego Movie.
So there’s plenty of evidence that Neeson can do funny. Perhaps that influences his choice of one of the funniest films of all time, a gender-bending Chris Columbus directed classic from 1993. Neeson told Letterboxd: “Mrs. Doubtfire springs to mind. And the outtakes were extraordinary too. And they are part of the movie, too, actually in the credits.”
“I once shared a taxi with Robin (Williams) and a few other actors. And he started rapping on some politician. And I remember thinking this is maybe what Shakespeare would have been like. Just this incredible stuff pouring out of his brain and his mouth. He was a genius.”
Sadly Neeson and Williams, who took his own life in 2014, never worked together, but they were closely linked throughout their careers. As Steven Spielberg made Neeson’s Schindler’s List the experience was so harrowing for him that he would often rely on Williams to call and cheer him up.
And one of the roles that Williams was most famous for, 1989’s Dead Poets Society was originally going to go to Neeson, who was reportedly first choice for the part, but he turned it down, later saying: “Robin was great… That was the right casting”. It certainly proved to be the case as Williams was eventually Oscar nominated for his performance in the movie.
Neeson meanwhile continues to work at a frenetic pace with some eight different projects in various stages of filming, including a pandemic thriller called Cold Storage co-starring Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, plus a standard Neeson fare thriller called Hotel Tehran and a film called The Mongoose with Ving Rhames and Marisa Tomei.
The action thriller was filmed in Australia and tells the story of a decorated war hero who is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, leading police on a cross-country car chase as former members of his unit and the public cheer him on.
