Liam Neeson: committing career suicide?
Liam Neeson has been “cast out”, said Brendan O’neill in The Spectator. “Overnight he has gone from being the avuncular star of ropey American thrillers to being ‘trash’, persona non grata, a foul, nasty man Hollywood should no longer indulge.” His crime? He confessed, during an interview, “to having once had a terrible thought, a thought he is deeply ashamed of”. Neeson was promoting his latest revenge thriller, Cold Pursuit, when he revealed that, many years ago, a close female friend was raped. Having discovered that the perpetrator was black, Neeson revealed that he walked around at night with a cosh, “hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, y’know? So that I could kill him.” This is certainly a bad thing to have done. But Neeson knows this. He was talking about the “primal” urge for revenge, and described his actions as “horrible, horrible”. Yet that doesn’t seem to matter. In the eyes of “the new morality police”, his regret “counts for nothing”.
Some people don’t seem to realise why Neeson’s story was quite so appalling, said David Olusoga in The Observer. It revealed, starkly, the kind of thinking that leads to racial murder. Why, having heard his friend’s story, did Neeson move from one guilty individual to an entire race? Why was he prepared to mete out collective punishment based on skin colour? “When recounting that critical leap of illogic, Neeson did so, seemingly, without analysis or acknowledgement.” Besides, the fact that he was prepared to discuss these murderous urges during a press junket for a trashy film suggests he didn’t understand the gravity of what he was saying.
On the contrary, he did, said Zoe Strimpel in The Sunday Telegraph. As Neeson said in a later interview: “You sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism and bigotry.” By confessing his shocking thoughts, he says he hoped to start a productive conversation. Instead, the mob demanded instant vengeance. Cold Pursuit’s red carpet premiere was cancelled. Some called for a boycott of his films, and there was widespread agreement that he had committed “career suicide”. Don’t expect anyone else to show such honesty any time soon.