Liam Neeson said the classic ‘Taken’ phone scene was “corny”
Love Actually star Liam Neeson has revealed that he was a little put off by the script for the classic phone scene from 2008’s Taken when he first saw it. The Northern Irish actor has now found peace with the scene, but he once feared the phrase “I have a particular set of skills” was especially “corny”.
In the hit action thriller, Neeson’s character Bryan Mills sees his teenage daughter and her friend off to travel in France. When kidnappers phone Mills to demand a ransom, he instead issues a threat, explaining that he has a “particular set of skills” that would help him track them down and kill them.
On a number of occasions over the past 15 years since the first movie aired, Neeson has said that he was pleasantly surprised to see the film take off the way it did, with fans demanding sequels. Director Olivier Megaton took the reins from Pierre Morel for two sequels in 2012 and 2014.
“I certainly did sound scary, but I thought it was corny,” Neeson told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “It was a cornball. I really did feel that. It’s nice to be proven wrong.”
In a previous interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2020, Neeson revealed that he thought the first Taken movie would be a disastrous box office flop and was delighted to see it perform so well. “I thought, ‘Well, this is going to go straight to video. A short little European thriller, it might play okay for a couple weeks in France, and then it will go straight-to-video,'” he said. “But Fox took it and they very cleverly did a good trailer and put it during various sporting events around the country and they made it a real success. I remember the first weekend it came in at number three, and then it came up to number two and then number one, and then it went down to number four, and it came up to number three again. It just had this extraordinary cycle.”
“I had no idea that it would lead onto other films and other action scripts,” Neeson told Entertainment Weekly in a separate interview in 2019. “They started sending me action scripts, and you’d see ‘Leading man, age 37’ crossed out and ‘late 40s, early 50s’ written in instead. I feel very privileged and a little bit guilty. I’m having fight scenes with guys half my age, and I just can’t stop laughing.”
Elsewhere, Neeson has recently caused a stir after calling MMA fighter Conor McGregor “a little leprechaun”, saying he had given Ireland “a bad name”.
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