Liam Neeson: 'It's A Gift To Find A Reason To Get Out Of Bed Every Morning'

70-year-old Liam Neeson has often been compared to trees.

At over 1.8m tall and of a powerful build, the Irish actor was dubbed the ‘oak tree’ by journalists, while a theater critic once dubbed him the ‘sequoia of sex’. And in 2017 he even played a yew tree in the film “A Monster Calls”.

But on a rainy morning in San Sebastián, Spain, Neeson enters the room of the Hotel María Cristina with an attitude more befitting a willow tree. He is in Spain to promote the film Marlowe – the film adaptation of The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), the novel in which John Banville revives Raymond Chandler’s 1933 private investigator.

During the press conference, a journalist urges Neeson to retell the saddest moment of his life. The question was about the Abraham Lincoln biopic that Steven Spielberg wanted to cast Neeson in, but Daniel Day-Lewis finally got it. The journalist may not have been aware (or perhaps fully aware) of the reason for the last-minute change. The script reading came just months after Neeson’s wife died in a skiing accident. At some point during the reading, the actor took Spielberg aside and confessed that he didn’t feel up to the task of playing the role.

Neeson’s narration turns the routine press conference — often a formality — into a meditation on grief. And in that mood he sits down to talk to EL PAÍS.

“I’ve always wanted to play [the fictional detective] Philip Marlowe,” he admits. “It didn’t intimidate me that the character was previously created by Humphrey Bogart [in The Big Sleep] or Robert Mitchum [in Farewell, My Lovely]. I knew director Neil Jordan would bring his own whimsical twist to the film. What intimidated me was the cast. Working with Jessica Lange again – 27 years after Rob Roy – with Diane Kruger, with Danny Huston, with Alan Cumming… but shooting in Barcelona was a real pleasure.” At the press conference, one of Marlowe’s producers pointed out that the credits of the film were full of Spanish names. “Catalan,” Neeson corrects him.

Liam Neeson in 1983.Don Smith (Getty Images)

Neeson was born in Ballymena, a working-class town in Northern Ireland. His background shaped the attitude he brought to his craft. “I enjoy working. I love having a reason to get up in the morning. I feel so fortunate and blessed to have been doing this professionally in theater since 1976. I tell my sons, ‘If you find a reason, get out of bed in the morning get up to do something you love to do, no matter what it is, you have a gift for the rest of your life.”

Part of him always felt he was being held back from his destiny and that he was supposed to be working in a factory in Belfast. Neeson grew up in a house full of women, with three sisters and a father who “didn’t use five words when he could say it.” [what he wanted to say] in two.” He was an acolyte, which gave him a passion for the theatricality of the Mass and a flair for Latin pronunciation.

As a teenager, he became a boxer, which led to him breaking his nose. The artistic calling came to him later when he discovered that acting could give him an access to his emotions in a way he had never been taught at home.

There’s an old custom among British and Irish actors: they act as if the leap from the stage to Hollywood was just a fluke. In British society, over-ambition is frowned upon and considered distasteful — especially when it comes to aspiring in a place as frivolous as Hollywood. But Liam Neeson has always been honest about his ambitions. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s because he wanted to see his face on the biggest screen possible. The revelation came while he was staying at a luxury hotel in Miami while filming The Mission. He turned on the TV and saw his face on an episode of Miami Vice where he played an IRA terrorist. Here I am, he told himself. “This is my place.”

Hollywood opened its doors to him, but it gave him a role he never expected: that of a sex symbol. He played sensitive and seductive men in thrillers such as Suspect (1987), The Good Mother (1988) and Under Suspicion (1991) and starred alongside legendary leading ladies such as Cher, Diane Keaton and Laura San Giacomo. Movieline magazine said Neeson conveyed “a gentle and humanized extension of male sexuality.” The tabloids also took pleasure in highlighting “his conquests” – Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, Cher, Brooke Shields, Jennifer Grey, Sinead O’Connor and even Barbra Streisand. His status as a leading man grabbed more headlines than his films. Around this time, actress Dana Delany joked, “If you put Liam Neeson, James Woods and Willem Dafoe in one room, there wouldn’t be room for everyone else.” Neeson’s public image was so linked to sex that Woody Allen put it in ” Husbands and Wives” (1992) and Whoopi Goldberg introduced him at the 1999 Oscars while she fondled the microphone in a suggestive way…

Neeson was particularly impressed by the definition of “sex sequoia” given to him by a New Yorker film critic in 1992. “She was referring to a play by Eugene O’Neill called Anna Christie. That’s where I met my wife. I got a review and I really liked it. I thought, “That’s great.” Not that I saw myself that way… But for the character I was playing, I had a very specific idea of what I was going to do, which was this big, lumbering one , half-naked man who comes to sea and was at sea for four weeks in a boat.” The play’s producer said Neeson got the part because he looked like a man who could seduce any woman in the world but himself only one lover.

Liam Neeson in 1988. Bonnie Schiffman Photography (Getty Images)

Natasha Richardson – his partner in Anna Christie – was married when they met. She did not try to hide or romanticize the infidelity: she confessed that first there was sex, and then, much later, love came. She was a British theater queen – the daughter of Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave – and he, the son of an Irish caretaker. When they got married, Vanity Fair reverted to a crude joke Katharine Hepburn once said about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, albeit with the genders reversed: “She gives him class, he gives her sex appeal.”

After a performance by Anna Christie, Steven Spielberg knocked on Neeson’s dressing room door. He wanted to greet him and introduce him to her mother-in-law, who was still crying after seeing the play. Neeson held her for several minutes and comforted her. In that moment, Spielberg knew he had found his Oskar Schindler.

Spielberg tried to take on the role of the German industrialist who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. He’d had Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner in mind, but feared too much star power would distract audiences from what was really important. “At first we thought we were going to do a little movie,” Neeson recalls, referring to “Schindler’s List.” “Steven Spielberg wanted to do this particular story. The script was fantastic. But it took them ten years to get the script where he wanted it to be. And we didn’t change a single comma. And it was released and took on a life of its own. It’s still set in schools and universities… I was seen in another department. I was offered more lead roles and scripts, which was great.”

Neeson became a Hollywood star. He’s grateful it happened at the age of 41, “rather than 19.”

“My life hasn’t changed. I had a pretty good idea of who I was…I’m glad I wasn’t a kid,” he sighs. That maturity, he admits, has led to a sense of responsibility toward his power in Hollywood. “I wanted to play old-fashioned hero characters that I grew up with in the movies. People who stood for something, who espoused the basic ethics of right and wrong.” He played the roles of successive historical figures such as Michael Collins – an Irish revolutionary – and Rob Roy, a Scottish clan chief, in the mid-1990s.

i still like [those movies]. When I read a script I try to find a main character that is good. It doesn’t have to be black or white; They may have flaws, but they have a mission. They ask for something, a truth or justice. And I feel like we need it [those characters] more than ever.”

But aren’t audiences more cynical today than they were in the 1990s?

“I think they’re more cynical. All the more reason to play such characters,” he shrugs.

Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson in 2006. Richardson died in a skiing accident in 2009. Bruce Glikas (FilmMagic)

Neeson seemed destined to grow old as a priest, monk and mentor, starring in iconic films such as Gangs of New York (2002), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Batman Begins (2005). Until 2009, when both his life and career took a violent turn. In January of the same year, the film Taken was released. “A little career tour that I was sure would come straight to DVD,” he jokes. The thriller – about a former CIA agent who travels to Paris to rescue his kidnapped teenage daughter – ended up raking in more than 10 times its $30 million budget. Neeson undoubtedly contributed to this success: Few actors could pull off the “I have special abilities” monologue.

In March 2009, in the midst of Taken’s success, his wife called. She told him she fell while skiing and was fine, just a little dizzy. But the next day she fell into a coma. Neeson flew to the hospital and no one let him in until a nurse recognized his face. Richardson never woke from her coma – she died on March 19, 2009.

To cope with this tragedy, Neeson has been busy: he embarked on one of the most surprising third acts in Hollywood: over the past 12 years he has made 41 films, 17 of them low-budget projects, in which the protagonist takes revenge on some criminals. With Taken, a modern film subgenre was born in which the Avengers take the law into their own hands, in the best tradition of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish II (1982). Neeson’s vigilante films — like Run All Night and A Walk Among the Tombstones — have made him a millionaire. The genre also offered a comeback to other actors of his generation, such as Pierce Brosnan and Denzel Washington.

Today, Liam Neeson doesn’t seem happy, but he certainly looks peaceful. He’s approaching his 71st birthday and hasn’t had a cigarette or a sip of alcohol in ten years — two things he’s done consistently for the last four decades. ewan [McGregor] Called me Qui-Gon Gin,” he reveals, referring to the amount of alcohol he drank while filming The Phantom Menace.

Neeson admits he’s at an age when you spend more time looking at the past than at the future. When asked what comes to mind when he thinks about his long career, he spends a few seconds silently pondering the question.

“Part of me has the same feelings as Anthony Hopkins. Every time I see him we hug and I’m like, ‘How are you Tony?’ And he’s like, ‘Great.’ I haven’t been found out yet.’ There’s a part of me that feels this and another part. I like the craft of acting. When I’m shooting a scene, I like to think: That was fine with me. That worked.'”