The role Liam Neeson has always wanted to play: “Very blessed, very lucky”
Liam Neeson’s career has two distinct parts: the period before Taken and the period after. Pierre Morel’s low-budget action thriller not only set the actor on a different path but spawned a whole new subgenre of gritty revenge thrillers featuring weary, husky-voiced antiheroes north of 50. Even Denzel Washington took a stab at it with The Equalizer franchise.
All of this was a sharp deviation for Neeson, who had spent the first 30 years of his career playing serious dramatic parts on the stage and screen, culminating in Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List. He earned an Oscar nomination for playing the titular humanitarian and seemed to be on a glide path to becoming one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent dramatic actors, but fate took him in a different direction.
Taken was made with a budget of only $25million, but when it hit theatres, it raked in more than $225 million. Playing a seemingly mild-mannered family man who takes the law into his own hands when Albanian gangsters kidnap his daughter, Neeson showed an ability to blend action with stoic pathos, portraying the character as a reluctant hero who only shows his set of very particular skills when given no other option.
Since then, the actor has been busy making various iterations of the film in the form of sequels and knockoffs. Although he is constantly threatening to retire from the genre, he shows no sign of stopping, even as he approaches his mid-70s. While many of his fans would love to see Neeson recycle Taken, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Run All Night, and Non-Stop until his last breath, the actor has expressed a desire to branch out a bit, or go back to his roots, depending on how you look at it. In an interview with AARP in 2022, the star was asked whether there was anything he was still hoping to accomplish.
“Ohh, to play King Lear, darlin’,” he said. “On the stage.”
He hastened to say that, at 70, he was just grateful to still be getting sent scripts and that even though some of them “aren’t so interesting,” he was “very blessed, very lucky” to still have work.
He may have backtracked on his desire to play Lear in order to avoid looking ungrateful for his lucrative second act as an action star, but it would be an excellent role for him. Having proved himself as a theatre actor early in his career and later as a grizzled man who is forced to wearily confront a life-or-death situation, Neeson is the perfect fit to play Shakespeare’s tragic king. He’d be in good company, too. John Gielgud, Michael Gambon, and Laurence Olivier have all played Lear, and Denzel Washington has announced his own plans to play the role.
If Neeson feels that he is now on a set path with action movies, he could also take an innovative leap and suggest a version of King Lear that blends Shakespeare’s text with the tone of the John Wick franchise. It might make theatre scholars clutch their pearls, but it would only further demonstrate how timeless the Bard’s work truly is.
