Neeson’s confession was courageous
It’s an unsettling image: Liam Neeson prowling the streets, a truncheon in hand, a racist, murderous rage in his heart.
It’s also one of the bravest confessions an actor has ever made.
While promoting his new film, Cold Pursuit, Neeson recalled an incident that has now put him in hot water. It was about 40 years ago. Neeson had returned from an overseas trip to discover a female friend had been brutally raped.
“She handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way,” Neeson told the Independent this week, in an interview that some are calling “career suicide.”
After asking if his friend knew the perpetrator — she did not — Neeson inquired about the assailant’s skin colour.
When his friend said the attacker was Black, he saw red.
What happened next could be the plot for a Neeson thriller about revenge.
After learning about the rape, Neeson wandered out in the dark for one week, loitering in Black neighbourhoods in search of vengeance. This is the chilling part. Neeson wasn’t working with authorities to help crack the case. This wasn’t vigilante justice against an individual. It was irrational payback against a group. It was bloodthirsty ignorance. Neeson was consumed by a blinding desire to murder any Black man.
Repeat: murder. Repeat: any Black man.
It was like vowing to blow up a hospital after learning a person in surgical scrubs had robbed your house. It’s disgusting. It makes no sense. But armed with his bludgeon, Neeson instinctively craved violent confrontation. So he put himself into potential snafus in which a “Black bastard” would “come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could” — pause — “kill him.”
As you might imagine, the revelation that one of Hollywood’s leading men — and an otherwise gentle and thoughtful soul who has endured unspeakable grief in his personal life — was once overcome with the urge to beat a random Black man to death is not exactly winning Neeson new fans.
On Tuesday, red carpet festivities for the Cold Pursuit premiere in New York were scrubbed. Social media, always a reliable gauge of reactionary outrage, lit up with demands for Neeson to be banished as an actor and as a human, to be edited out of upcoming films and history itself.
“This racist can go straight to hell,” was a popular sentiment.
Perhaps at the urging of his publicist — who likely broke a Guinness World Record this week for the fastest guzzling of Pepto-Bismol — Neeson granted an interview to Good Morning
America on Tuesday. He attempted to clarify his incendiary memory of once longing to commit a hate crime.
As he told a clearly rattled Robin Roberts: “I’m not a racist.”
Neeson also mentioned the context — Northern Ireland in the ’70s — as a factor in his us-versus-them mindset at the time of this aspirational mayhem. This explanation should not be dismissed as a cop-out. Neeson, now 66, was living in a society torn asunder with viciousness predicated upon an intolerance based on identity.
But the crucial part — and this is the part his critics are now either missing or choosing to ignore — is that he accepts responsibility. Nothing actually happened, it’s worth remembering. Neeson didn’t hurt anyone.
So what he is doing now is acknowledging a thought crime.
And what he is saying is that he almost did something profoundly wrong.
His reaction to the rape now disturbs him as much as the rape itself.
“I had never felt this feeling before, which was a primal urge to lash out,” Neeson told GMA. “It really shocked me, this primal urge I had. It shocked me and it hurt me.”
It is this hurt — not the thought crime — that is the teachable moment.
If one flashpoint event could nudge Liam Neeson into David Duke territory, it might be wise for society to, as he notes, “talk about these things.”
We are not as egalitarian as we seem to believe. Deep down, our lizard brains are hard-wired with a startling capacity to prejudge and generalize and overreact. As politics has shown in recent years, we are more tribal than we care to admit. We are prone to snap judgments and in-group bias. We have a scary propensity to demonize, and an even scarier knack to scapegoat and rationalize hostility.
It doesn’t take much to assume the worst in someone who is different.
“I was trying to show honour, to stand up for my dear friend in this terrible, medieval fashion,” Neeson told GMA. “I’m a fairly intelligent guy, that’s why it kind of shocked me when I came down to Earth after having these horrible feelings.”
That’s a courageous admission. So don’t hate Neeson for his dark thoughts from 40 years ago. Admire him for this week’s enlightening honesty.
What he confessed, however revolting, was a powerful reminder that “violence breeds violence” and “bigotry breeds bigotry.”
And no one, not even a famous celebrity, is immune to hate.