The Allison Janney performance based on Liam Neeson: “I think of his movies”
Allison Janney is best known for playing many, many classy, self-assured and hilarious women.
From White House Secretary CJ Cregg in The West Wing and a recovering addict in Mom, right the way down to the tiny role as guidance counsellor and erotic fiction writer Ms Perky in 10 Things I Hate About You, she can be counted on to steal the show with her quirky characters.
So the last person you would possibly put in her list of inspiration is Liam Neeson, the Irish leading man known best for his action roles. But just as Neeson pivoted from more serious dramatic roles to money-maker action hits, Janney too pivoted from her usual typecasting to something a lot more gritty with 2002’s Lou.
A Netflix action film, it follows Janney as the titular Lou, a seemingly normal if depressed loner whose very particular set of skills is revealed when her tenant’s daughter is kidnapped; sounds a little familiar, right?
Well, Neeson’s turn in Taken did inspire a whole sub-genre of action films that never quite reached the same heights, and Janney is the first to cite him as an influence: “I think of his movies and what he did, and I loved watching all of those, and Lou is different, but the same kind of genre.”
Lou is different in that Janney is, in fact, a woman, which is still something a little less represented in the genre, and she’s hunting for her tenant’s daughter, not her own, in the US, and not France. But she is ex-CIA, just as Neeson’s character in Taken, with major ass-kicking also involved on her part, and spoiler alert, the daughter actually turns out to be her granddaughter.
Janney also singled out Helen Mirren, a fellow female actor who turned from more serious roles to kick-ass action in her later years with the likes of Red and Anna. In fact, it’s not all that uncommon a pivot, especially when those frivolous action flicks put up the kind of money they do. For someone like Janney, it’s also a way to prove that you’ve got range. It can be easy to be pigeon-holed and typecast as an actor, and while that’s not necessarily what happened to her, not many would have looked at her filmography and seen her as a guaranteed action star.
Not that Lou put her in action star territory, because, unfortunately, it wasn’t half as good a film as she is an actor. Fortunately, though, Janney is one of those actors who improves pretty much everything she touches, so all was not entirely lost. It might have gone straight to streaming and might not have taken off quite as well as Neeson or Mirren’s action turns, but if you want to watch her kick some butt, then it’s out there for your perusal.
