“I’d never done that stuff before”: the movie that made Liam Neeson feel like a “twat”
Prior to enjoying his late-career reinvention as a throat-punching action hero, Liam Neeson had already evolved from a respected leading man and character actor into the guy who pops up in blockbusters to play father figures, mentors, and sages.
He was hardly a stranger to escapist genre fare before that, though, with two of his earliest roles coming in the Arthurian epic Excalibur and cult favourite fantasy Krull. Between those two points, he set about making a name for himself as a reliable presence, but he remained very eager to embrace the CGI revolution.
Sci-fi sequel Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, horror remake The Haunting, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Clash of the Titans and sequel Wrath of the Titans, disastrous board game adaptation Battleship, and the tank-flying shenanigans of The A-Team ensured Neeson was no stranger to pixels, but he was always an actor in a costume at the end of the day.
J.A. Bayona’s dark family drama A Monster Calls was a completely different animal, however, with Neeson lending his gravitas to the titular creature. In a stark difference from his voice-only role as Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, he was required to suit up in the unflattering motion capture leotard to do the job.
It was uncharted territory for the grizzled Irishman, and he wasn’t too keen on it. “The motion capture, I’d never done that stuff before,” he admitted to Pop Entertainment. “The first day, I felt like a twat. It’s just, I felt like a jerk. You’re in a onesie with ping pong balls all over your body attached to sensors.”
The digital wizards responsible for turning his work into a hulking humanoid tree didn’t escape unscathed, either, with the star referring to them as “five computer nerds behind laptops”. The backdrops would also be filled in digitally, and while Neeson would refer to the cavernous set as being “space” for him to work in, the tech guys referred to it by its actual name of the Volume “because they are computer nerds”.
Not that he hated it, with Neeson describing the real-time relay of his performance as “an extraordinary process,” even if he didn’t become any more complimentary of the visual effects crew. He’d act out his scenes opposite young co-star Lewis MacDougall, and then, as he put it, “the computer nerds are giving you this digital makeup” so he could see what the monster would look like as he’d performed it.
Thanks to the constantly evolving technology, when Neeson wasn’t available or otherwise engaged, the actor who stood in for the monster on set was Tom Holland. Yep, the Spider-Man guy, despite the fact he and Neeson are separated by almost 45 years in age and almost a foot in height. He can say what he wants about them, but those computer nerds sure know their stuff.
