The role Liam Neeson demanded to be fired from: “You have to recast this now”
Have you ever put years and years of blood, sweat, and tears into preparing for something? If so, you’ll know precisely how mentally and physically taxing that can be. However, what would you do if you pushed yourself for so long to perfect something, yet when it finally came to pass, you realised you were all wrong for it? This is the heartbreaking scenario that faced Liam Neeson during pre-production on one of his most prestigious pictures – and he was so despondent that he begged the director to fire him.
In the early 2000s, Steven Spielberg began developing a movie based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. That biography of the legendary president was still being written when Spielberg optioned the movie rights, and it wound up not being published until 2005. In January of that year, Neeson was cast as the iconic leader, and the movie was initially set to go into production in 2006. However, over the next four years, the movie was delayed due to script issues and studio troubles.
The project eventually started to move forward in 2010, by which point Neeson had been deep in the weeds with research for four long years. However, something was nagging at the Taken star, and it was becoming harder and harder to ignore. He had prepared for so long to play Lincoln based on a script by playwright Paul Webb that he described to GQ as “a wonderful kind of old-fashioned biography…from his inauguration to his death”.
When that draft was scrapped in favour of one by Tony Kushner, which focussed on two months in Lincoln’s life as he tried to push through the 13th Amendment, Neeson couldn’t help worrying that he had become too old for the part.
“I just was cringing with embarrassment.”
Liam neeson
It all came to a head for Neeson during a table read for the movie alongside co-stars like John Lithgow and Sally Field. In addition to his worries about the script and his suitability for the role, Neeson was also grieving the loss of his beloved wife, Natasha Richardson, only a month prior. Still, the stalwart actor tried to push forward with the reading – until he had what he described as a “thunderbolt moment”. Just as he was about to speak Lincoln’s first set of lines, he thought, “I’m not supposed to be here. This is gone. I’ve passed my sell-by date. I don’t want to play this Lincoln. I can’t be him.”
Neeson described the next two to three hours as a kind of waking nightmare in which he watched great actors read through an “extraordinary piece of writing” that he struggled to find any connection to. “It was a very strange feeling, and it was partly grief,” he theorised. “I read very, very poorly by any standards, but then some people come up afterward, and say, ‘Oh, you’re made to play Lincoln.’ I just was cringing with embarrassment.”
At this point, a disillusioned Neeson told Spielberg, the director he’d been working with on the project on and off for almost a decade, “Steven, you have to recast this now”. Naturally, the iconic filmmaker was shocked, replying, “What are you talking about?” Neeson was deadly serious, though, and after a conversation with Goodwin, the author of the biography, he only became more convinced that Spielberg needed to let him go. He phoned Spielberg that night and admitted, “Steven, this is not for me. I can’t explain it. It’s gone.”
It was a sad end to a project that Neeson had been incredibly passionate about, but all was not lost. He had a suggestion for Spielberg about the right actor to portray Lincoln in this particular biopic: his old pal Daniel Day-Lewis. Neeson and Leonardo DiCaprio wound up imploring Day-Lewis to take the role, and in November 2010, it was announced that the method-acting giant had replaced Neeson.
