BANVILLE DEFENDS NEESON
WEXFORD author John Banville has leapt to the defence of Liam Neeson after the Hollywood actor found himself at the centre of a racism storm.
Neeson sparked outrage by saying he once had violent thoughts about killing a black person after a friend of his was raped. He had been lined up to star in the crime movie Marlowe, which is being adapted from Banville’s book ‘The BlackEyed Blonde’.
The Wexford-man leapt to the defence of the star, saying that he is being ‘demonised’.
‘Does no-one listen any more?’ Banville asked, speaking to the Press Association. ‘Liam Neeson was delivering a cautionary tale. His point was that we must resist our primitive urges - and we all have primitive urges – and that his week, long ago, of plotting revenge for a specific outrage by doing violence to a person at random was something he was and is ashamed of.’
‘Liam Neeson is a decent man and does not deserve to be demonised in this way,’ the Booker prize winner concluded.
The controversy arose during a press junket for Neeson’s latest film ‘Cold Pursuit’ and was discussing how his character turns to anger before talking about an experience in his own life after a friend was raped.
‘My immediate reaction was... I asked, did she know who it was? No. What colour were they? She said it was a black person,’ he said. ‘I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody–I’ m ashamed to say that–and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some black b*****d would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.’
Admitting his shame at his thought process, he concluded: ‘It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that. And I’ve never admitted that, and I’m saying it to a journalist. God forbid.’
In the wake of the controversy, Neeson also pointed out that he grew up during the Troubles, surrounded by violence.