The movie Liam Neeson thinks he was miscast in: “I did not like my acting at all”
Liam Neeson has ventured from a deadly father with a specialist set of skills to a Jacobite outlaw and even a soppy romcom star in his footloose career. For some, he will forever and always be the humble Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. For others, he will remain most pertinently in their minds as the German industrialist Oscar Schindler from Speilberg’s Holocaust passion project Schindler’s List.
In essence, Neeson is a difficult man to miscast. He’s been in just about every genre, always managing to make it work—even poking fun at his serious demeanour in a hilarious appearance on Life’s Too Short. It’s remarkably rare for someone as stern and instantly recognisable as Neeson to possess such versatility, seamlessly transitioning from action roles to drama and even comedy.
However, there is one performance that he looks back on as oddly out of place. Neeson might have received acclaim for his performance in Widows, the 2018 neo-noir heist thriller directed by Steve McQueen, but when he looked back on it himself, he found something amiss.
Starring an award-winning ensemble cast including Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, and Michelle Rodriguez, Widows follows a group of women who all lose their respective criminal husbands in a police shootout yet decide to come together to execute the robbery their partners were planning before their deaths. Neeson stars as Harry Rawlings, Davis’ husband, who appears routinely in flashbacks that haunt Davis’s presence within the film as she and her fellow widows attempt to execute the heist.
Despite the relative success of McQueen’s film, Neeson argues he was wrongly cast in the film. “Yeah, it was a good movie,” Neeson remarked to Rolling Stone. “I was miscast, I have to say. I mean that a 1000%. I hadn’t seen it before the Toronto Film Festival, and most of my interviews were with Viola Davis. I’m so glad I didn’t see the film because I wouldn’t have been there. I really believe I was miscast. I did not like my acting at all. I love the film. Viola, Brian, and all the girls were terrific in that.”
A surprising comment, perhaps, considering Widows sits perfectly within Neeson’s wheelhouse as an action star and his love of playing the everyman hellbent on revenge. Despite Neeson’s own peculiar derision, the film certainly remains a fan favourite even though it did somewhat lose out at the Box Office due to being released alongside Mark Wahlberg’s popcorn comedy Instant Family and blockbuster sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.
By no means is his performance in the movie worthy of the scathing take that Neeson himself has dished out, but there is something ‘caught in two worlds’ about his offering. We’re simply so used to seeing him in among the action; then, when the fireworks unfurl, and he’s a sorry passenger in the story, it proves difficult to truly place him. In some ways, it’s like watching Jim Carrey play the straight character in a comedy movie.
As ever, in Neeson’s prolific and varied career, this did little to break his stride as his filmography has only been flooded with further diverse roles ever since.
