The role Liam Neeson turned down because he didn’t want to play second fiddle: “What’s the point?”
Relative to the number of movies he appeared in, Liam Neeson wasn’t a nailed-on leading man for the majority of his career until Taken. Sure, he was the top-billed name in the cast on plenty of occasions, but he wasn’t always the main selling point.
Obviously, that changed in a major way following his throat-punching rampage through Paris, with producers and filmmakers throwing action-orientated scripts at his door. Neeson’s particular set of skills became its own genre, and it’s one that he’s been mining for almost 20 years, despite his repeated insistence that his days of snapping necks and cashing cheques are almost over.
To put the Academy Award nominee’s late-stage reinvention into perspective, it’s best to look at the facts. In the decade before Taken, Neeson was in 13 films and was credited first in four. It’s not a bad return, but hardly the output of an actor who’s viewed as a leading man first and foremost.
By comparison, in the decade after Taken, Neeson popped up in no less than 27 pictures, excluding cameo appearances and voice-only roles, 14 of which saw him awarded top billing. Not only did he dramatically increase his workload, but he substantially upped his top-billed turns, which made him less inclined to take a supporting part when he really had his eyes on the juiciest – and more lucrative – spot on the ensemble.
Ray Winstone may have laughed at first when he was offered the chance to antagonise Russell Crowe’s title character in Darren Aronofsky’s biblical epic Noah, but he only had the opportunity because Neeson wasn’t interested after deciding that if he wasn’t going to be the star of the show, he didn’t want to be a part of it at all.
“For ten seconds, I was going to be Noah,” he told Den of Geek before the movie went in front of cameras. “But Russell is up for that one, I think. Then they wanted me to be his nemesis, but I was like, ‘Bah’. If you’re not Noah, what’s the point, you know?”
Instead of decamping to Iceland between July and November of 2012 to shoot Noah, Neeson opted to do current-era Neeson things. In the year Aronosfky’s contentious adaptation of the ‘Good Book’ arrived in cinemas, his first choice for the villain set about beating the shit out of disposable henchmen in Non-Stop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and Taken 3, all of which were released within months of each other in 2014.
Neeson is definitely imposing and stately enough to have played Noah, but those same qualities would have made him a decent fit for Tubal-cain, too. He was one of cinema’s marquee action stars, though, which meant his decision-making was increasingly based on how much screen time he was getting and how much he would be getting paid for it.
