The movie Liam Neeson was terrified to make: “The nerves never passed”
Although he’s become mainly associated with the action genre in recent years, Liam Neeson has appeared in all kinds of movies throughout his career. If it wasn’t for the runaway success of 2008’s Taken, he might still be generating Oscar buzz on a regular basis the way he was in the 1990s. For many fans, however, his late-career transformation into an action hero has been an unexpected delight; it would be just fine if he stayed the course.
One of the genres that Neeson hasn’t spent much time doing is comedy. We know he can leverage that husky voice and intense stare for dramatic effect, but those characteristics don’t exactly signal levity. That said, his on-screen persona is so intense that it can be used for comedic effect. In 2011, he appeared on an episode of the Ricky Gervais, Warwick Davis sitcom Life’s Too Short. In it, Neeson played a fictionalised version of himself, visiting Gervais and Stephen Merchant to tell them that he’s planning to branch out into comedy. His utter humourlessness makes the scene deadpan comedy gold.
Despite being able to draw laughs by doing essentially the same thing he does in his action movies, Neeson revealed that his recent foray into comedy on the big screen was a terrifying experience. Speaking to Collider in October, the actor said that starring in the upcoming Naked Gun reboot required some courage.
“The nerves never passed,” he said. “[I]t’s a genre I’m not really used to. I’ve done a couple of little TV sketches that might last two minutes or something. But, for a whole movie, this was a novel experience for me.”
The reboot has been in the works for more than a decade. Based on the popular Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker police spoof starring the late Leslie Nielsen, the sequel was first floated in 2013 but has undergone a series of cast, screenwriter, and director changes in the years since. Set to be released in the summer of 2025, it’s directed by Akiva Schaffer, who is best known for his collaboration with Andy Samberg in the comedy music group The Lonely Island. Seth Macfarlane was brought in to write the story, which might fill audiences with a sense of dread given that his last satirical collaboration with Neeson, A Million Ways to Die in the West, was a disastrously unfunny vanity project.
The cast includes Pamela Anderson, Danny Huston, and Paul Walter Hauser, which may have bolstered Neeson’s confidence. Earlier this year, when the film was still casting the supporting roles, Neeson said that he hoped his co-stars would be capable comedians so that he could play his role with deadly seriousness.
Still, he admitted after the film had wrapped that he was nervous throughout the entire production. “I was a bit nervous most days,” he said. “Because I wasn’t sure if I was funny, to be honest.” Ultimately, if he’s opting for the deadpan route, which is most likely given that the film will be a spoof of his action persona, it will all come down to the script. That was made glaringly obvious when he played a straight-faced parody of himself in both Life’s Too Short and A Million Ways to Die in the West with vastly different results.
