Neeson premiere cancelled at last minute
New York red carpet event cancelled after star reveals he went out looking for a ‘black b------’ to murder
The New York premiere of Liam Neeson’s new film was cancelled at the last minute yesterday after he confessed to violent thoughts about black people. Just hours before the event to promote Cold Pursuit was due to start, organisers told reporters it was no longer going ahead. Neeson had earlier defended his account of going out armed with a cosh to look for “a black b------” to kill in revenge for a friend’s rape. He said he was being honest.
THE New York premiere of Liam Neeson’s new film was cancelled at the last minute yesterday after he confessed to violent thoughts about black people.
Just hours before the event to promote Cold Pursuit was due to start, organisers told reporters it was no longer going ahead.
However, a behind closed doors screening was due to take place for the actors, their friends and family.
Earlier in the day, Neeson defended his account of wanting to kill an innocent black man in revenge for a friend’s rape, saying people should stop pretending to be politically correct.
The Hollywood actor shocked fans when he admitted he went out armed with a cosh to look for “a black b------” to kill. Yesterday, instead of going on a damage limitation exercise, the star went on breakfast television in the US to say he had simply been honest.
“We all pretend we are all politically correct. In this country, it’s the same in my own country, you sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism and bigotry,” he said. However, he insisted, “I’m not racist”.
Neeson said the incident had happened nearly 40 years ago when “a very dear friend of mine was brutally raped”. Asked why he had demanded to know the perpetrator’s colour, the 66-year-old said if she had said Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian, “I know it would have had the same effect.”
Neeson, whose wife Natasha Richardson died after a skiing accident 10 years ago, told Good Morning America:
“There were some nights I went out deliberately into black areas in this city looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence. I was trying to show honour, to stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion. I’m a fairly intelligent guy – that’s why it shocked me when I came down to Earth after having these terrible feelings. Luckily no violence occurred ever, thanks be to God.” He added: “I did seek help. I went to a priest to hear my confession.” The woman in question died five years ago, he added. He ended the interview urging fans to see Cold Pursuit, his latest film, where his character seeks re- venge for his son’s murder. But in Britain, Janet Hills, chairman of the Metropolitan Black Police Association, found his comments “disappointing”.
She said: “When I align that with policing it’s why it’s so key that we use intelligence-led policing to identify individuals, and not profile a whole community with regard to criminal activities. There are specifics. In his case there was a specific person who committed that. It wasn’t just any black man on the streets,” she said.
Dr Zubaida Haque, of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, called Neeson a “racist nut-head”.
She said: “We are looking at lynching
‘This saddens me on so many levels. Least of all because I love Liam Neeson’s body of work’
stuff here, hunting for a random black man; to commit a racist murder. He was ready to blame an entire ethnic group to avenge an alleged rape of a friend.”
David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, tweeted: “This saddens me on so many levels. Least of all because I love Liam Neeson’s body of work.”
However, John Barnes, the former footballer, said: “You can’t blame Liam Neeson for thinking what he feels, because this is what society has shown him that black people do,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.
If the Oscars are looking for a sure-fire way to boost their viewing figures this year, perhaps they should think about getting Liam Neeson on stage for a live Q&A. If the 66-year-old star will confess to having once contemplated racist murder in the dreary environs of a press junket, then who knows what might come out in the febrile atmosphere of Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre? Neeson made the extraordinary admission in an interview published earlier this week, in the context of discussing the “primal” human thirst for revenge. (His latest film, Cold Pursuit, is about a snowplough driver exacting vigilante justice.)
Around 40 years ago, after learning that someone close to him had been raped by an unidentified “black person”, the actor told The Independent that he spent a week or so walking around predominantly black areas while carrying a cosh, in the hope that “some black b-----would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.”
Fortunately, nothing came of it, and Neeson now regards the incident as what is sometimes described as a teachable moment. “But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the f--- are you doing,’ you know?” he added. His PR team may be currently asking themselves the same question.
From almost any other actor this might have sounded like a tall, twisted tale, but with Neeson it has the grim ring of truth. It has been a theme common in his work for years. For more than 10 years, the sexagenarian actor has repeatedly gone back to exactly this kind of subject matter, in a series of violent action thrillers in which he typically plays a husband or father beating back an (often racially coded) underworld horde, which has risen up to snap at the sanctity of his family unit.
The trend began with 2008’s Taken, which at the time was something new for Neeson: a European action thriller with a Death Wish vibe, about a former CIA operative who travels to Paris and obliterates an Albanian sex-trafficking ring, after they abduct his teenage daughter. He has often said since that he expected the film to go straight to DVD. Instead, it spawned two sequels, became a billion-dollar franchise, and established its star
– then in his mid-fifties – as Hollywood’s hottest new action dad.
Since then, a host of middle-aged actors, from Sean Penn to Kevin Costner, have attempted to Neesonise their careers, without success, but Neeson has proved almost uniquely plausible in such silverhaired lone wolf roles. Taken’s director, Pierre Morel, said at the time of the film’s release that he had been drawn to the actor’s “background and baggage”: a rough-and-ready upbringing in a working-class Catholic family in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.
Neeson was a teenager during the Troubles, when violent division was an integral part of everyday life. Before acting, he found purpose in amateur boxing, having trained under his parish priest, and was a three-time juvenile champion of Northern Ireland by the age of 17. Acting took him first to Dublin and then London, after he was cast by John Boorman in the 1981 Arthurian epic Excalibur. But it was only when he moved to Los Angeles in 1986 that he says he stopped seeing his Irish roots as an encumbrance.
It’s telling that the only other actor to have successfully carved out a career in action-revenge films is Keanu Reeves – whose John Wick trilogy ties itself up this year, and whose personal life, like Neeson’s, has been scarred by a high-profile loss. Reeves, 54, lost his ex-partner Jennifer Syme in a car crash in 2001; Neeson, his wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, as a result of head injuries sustained during a skiing lesson in 2009. Some have attempted to understand Neeson’s midcareer swerve as a response to Richardson’s death, though he has certainly never characterised it as such – and besides, it all feels a little neat; real life is far messier and less cohesive than a Taken screenplay, even Taken 3’s.
As someone who has carried out more than my fair share of stop-watched hotel-room tête-à-têtes, I can confirm candour on the level of “I once wanted to kill an innocent black man” is rare, to say the least.
But while that desire (as if it even needs to be said) is staggeringly racist, being outraged about his decision to discuss it seems wrong-headed – and not just because actors don’t speak freely enough in interviews as it is. Neeson’s confession acknowledges a dark part of our nature that few of us, film stars or otherwise, would like to publicly admit. While most of us would stop short of prowling the streets hunting someone down, we have all felt irrational stabs of ill-will towards whole subsets of people based on one-off incidents. That actors like Neeson use their pasts to equip themselves for roles shouldn’t startle us: transporting themselves into places and mindsets most of us would understandably shrink from is part of the job.
Just as long as they don’t, you know, actually go there.