Liam Neeson names the one kind of role no actor can play convincingly: “You really can’t”
Everyone knows Liam Neeson is a bit testy. Aside from standing six feet four and having the kind of speaking voice that would have an attacking mountain lion pausing for thought and considering its options, he’s made a career out of holding a gun very threateningly and showing he isn’t afraid to use it.
But what if it actually came down to a bit of fisticuffs with Ballymena’s finest? What if you told him to put the pistol down, stop making gravel-voiced monologues over the phone and got him to put his dukes up for a bit of man-on-man action? Well, unfortunately, you’d be shit out of luck there too, because Neeson was an amateur boxer of some repute growing up, a three-time juvenile champion no less, so anyway you cut it, you’re in trouble.
In fact, Neeson could well have chosen a life in the ring rather than a life in front of the cameras had he not suffered a concussion at age 16. He was good enough after seven years learning the sport that at one point he had ambitions of appearing for Northern Ireland at the Olympic level, but once he experienced a concerning post-fight blackout, he decided it wasn’t the most sensible path to take.
Instead, after joining a local theatre company, he got the acting bug, after which it took him just two years to appear in his first movie toward the end of the 1970s. By 1984, he was well on the way to becoming an established film talent, appearing with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty, with De Niro in 1986’s The Mission and then Clint Eastwood in 1988’s Dirty Harry sequel, The Dead Pool.
Then, two years later, he was able to lean back on his upbringing to make The Big Man alongside Billy Connolly, a low-budget sports drama set in Glasgow about an unemployed former miner released from jail who decides to make a bit of money out of bare-knuckle boxing.
It wasn’t much of a hit with audiences or critics, but Neeson was proud of the film nevertheless, and it was made just as another prominent Irish boxer, a former WBA Featherweight champion named Barry McGuigan, was hanging up his gloves.
Neeson told HuffPost how he’d followed McGuigan’s career closely, revealing, “Barry and I used to hang out. I see him every now and again. There are a few of them. Jim McCourt was one of the world’s great lightweight amateur champions from Belfast, and there was Mickey Tohill as well. Oh God, they were great amateurs, and they were fantastic.”
The actor also talked about what his many years pounding the punching bags as a teen gave him, adding, “[They] gave me a work ethic. If you want something, you have to fight for it and work towards it. There is no discipline greater [than boxing], and when you are in the ring, you are in there with all your strengths and all your weaknesses. You can’t act being a boxer in the ring, you really can’t.”
Neeson would go on to revisit boxing on film when he acted as narrator for the 2014 documentary about the Filipino legend Manny Pacquiao. Meanwhile, the Irishman has plenty of new projects coming up, including two of his standard revenge thrillers, The Fix and The Mongoose, plus a comedy with Matthew Modine called The Splendid Thing, out next year.
