The movie Liam Neeson’s driver urged him not to make: “I felt quite embarrassed”
Sometimes, an actor will agree to star in a movie after reading the script, but there are often a number of sounding boards they’ll turn to for advice first. Liam Neeson was already in the midst of shooting when the guy ferrying him around between locations questioned whether it was a career risk worth taking, so the ball was already in motion.
Still, whereas the stars will look to their agents, families, friends, managers, or publicists for guidance, Neeson’s driver took it upon himself to act as the voice of reason. How the chauffeur managed to get their hands on the screenplay in the first place remains a mystery, never mind taking it upon themselves to interrogate their charge on why it maybe wasn’t the right thing to be doing.
It did lead to a serious conversation between the pair, even if history has shown that Neeson was right to stick to his guns. He’d spent decades as a respected actor, Academy Award-nominated star, and expert dispenser of gravitas-laden exposition as a mentor or father figure, but one thing he hadn’t spent a lot of time doing was running around Europe beating people to a pulp with his bare hands.
Of course, that all changed when Taken came along, with Neeson headlining an unexpected box office hit that was at one point considered for the straight-to-video route but instead launched a second wind that’s still going strong two decades later. And to think, if he’d listened to his driver, his renaissance as a man of action may never have happened.
“I had a driver when I was doing Taken, and we were shooting in LA for the first week, and at the end of the first week, my driver, as he dropped me off at the hotel, he said, ‘Mr Neeson, can I ask you a question?'” he recalled to ScreenRant. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure’. He says, ‘I’ve started to read the script of Taken. I’ve got to page 40′, I think he said. ‘It says you’ve taken the lives of 26 people.'”
The implication was clear: Neeson’s driver clearly didn’t think it was befitting an actor of his reputation and calibre to cavort around the continent, swatting away henchmen like they were flies. “I didn’t know how to answer that,” he admitted. “I felt quite embarrassed. They said it in such a way as if, ‘Are you sure you’ve read this script? Because you do nasty things to people.'”
Needless to say, the driver must have felt pretty foolish when Taken reinvented Neeson as an old-age ass-kicking machine, and he only went and killed even more people in the sequel. It would have been an odd thing for the star to suddenly back out of Taken – much like Jeff Bridges did – after an intervention from the chauffeur, and the odds are high that the driver probably wasn’t there on opening night to buy a ticket.
