Mother’s job loss fuels Liam Neeson’s latest role
The list of revenge targets in “Honest Thief” is long — this is a Liam Neeson action movie after all — but it all starts with banks.
Neeson plays a man who robs a bank because of the way its executives mistreated his father, a story element the actor responded to on a deeply personal level.
For Neeson, raised in Northern Ireland, it reminded him of the way his mother, Kitty, was laid off just short of qualifying for the modest pension she’d been working toward, one of the reasons she toiled in the same low-wage job for three decades.
“My mom, who just passed away a couple of months ago, she worked as a dinner lady in a girls’ school in my hometown for 33, 34 years. Working long hours, walking to school, and walking back. Didn’t have a car, never learned to drive,” said Neeson.
“I believe her take-home pay — she showed it to me once — the check was something like $150 for the month,” he said. “And I remember it made me really angry. Really angry. It also made me love my mother even more, what she did for 34 bloody years, working for a pittance.”
Her retirement prospects improved when son Liam, 68, graduated from operating a forklift at the local Guinness plant to fame and fortune on stage and screen. (“I took care of her,” he is quick to say.) But he still recalls that teeth-gritting anger of watching her lose her retirement security, and tapped into it for “Honest Thief,” now in theaters.
He plays Tom, a retired Navy demolitions expert who uses, yes, a particular set of skills developed over a long career, to break into bank vaults.
Tom is another version of the chivalrous vigilante character that’s become a staple for Neeson, who made three “Taken’s” and several “Taken” variations — including “Taken” on a train (“The Commuter”) and “Taken” on a plane (“Non-Stop”).
For late-blooming action hero Neeson, “Taken” and its descendants have functioned as a kind of golden parachute, the kind his mother never got.
After a long and double-Oscar-nominated career (“Schindler’s List,” “Kinsey”) of doing distinguished and challenging cinema — he was Hollywood’s go-to guy for serious biography like Michael Collins — his career took a turn.
He hadn’t punched anyone since he gave up boxing as a teen, but at age 60, he suddenly became the world’s top choice for pummeling onscreen bad guys.
It wasn’t planned, he had no idea it was coming, and he still doesn’t know quite what to make of it.
“I remember reading (the ‘Taken’ script) and thinking, this is going straight to video. But it’s three months in Paris, so what the hell. I just thought this will be a cool little European thriller. I was stunned at the success.”
Had he any inkling that those now-famous words — “I’m a man with a very particular set of skills” — would grab the world by its pop-culture collar and never let go?
“Nothing against the writer or director, but no.”