The only action movie Liam Neeson turned down: “This would be tough for a 22-year-old”
It’s fascinating to wonder where Liam Neeson would be right now if not for Taken. He’d be fine in the grand scheme of things, considering his career was hardly in danger of stagnating before he started punching henchmen in the throat regularly, but his trajectory could have turned out very differently.
For one thing, he wasn’t the first choice to play Bryan Mills in the movie that launched his unexpected second wind as cinema’s marquee elder statesman of ass-kicking. Jeff Bridges was initially cast in the role before dropping out, presenting the intriguing possibility that maybe he could have gone on to enjoy a late-stage reinvention as a grizzled badass had he stayed the course.
Instead, Neeson embraced the unexpected success of Taken and has spent the better part of two decades rehashing the formula. He’s been threatening to bow out of the genre for at least ten years, and seeing as he’s got multiple irons in the fire that will inevitably involve him gunning down assorted goons and/or protecting his family, the fact he’s claimed the end is nigh multiple times doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
Of course, there will come a time when Neeson hangs up his action hero hat for good, and it should really be soon after the law of diminishing returns started to set in a long time ago. It’s been a while since the Academy Award-nominated actor headlined an all-guns-blazing flick that was anything other than mediocre, perhaps indicating that he keeps making them because he’ll happily say yes to any script that comes across his desk.
However, that isn’t the case, according to Neeson. Then again, because there are exceptions that always prove the rule, it makes sense that the number of action-orientated scripts the star has ever rejected doesn’t extend beyond a solitary screenplay that he wasn’t even convinced his stunt doubles could make look convincing.
“The stunts I leave to the stuntman. The fighting I do myself, and I keep reasonably fit for that,” he told AARP in early 2022, admitting that he kept making them because they kept making money. “They wanted me to do one with Jackie Chan, which, when I read it, I thought, ‘Well, this would be tough for a 22-year-old to do, let alone a 69-year-old who’s going to be 70 this year’. That’s the only one I turned down.”
Chan is less than two years younger than Neeson, but the latter didn’t think he could keep up with the legend. It would be a dream team-up for action aficionados, only for the inescapable ravages of time to be a deal-breaker. He didn’t name the project he passed on, but it may have been Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner, a guess that’s based entirely on Pierce Brosnan – like Neeson, an Irishman who was in his late 60s when production started in January 2016 – playing the villain of the piece.
