A dreamy film and reallife grief
It says on the movie poster that Micheál Richardson is costarring alongside his father, Liam Neeson, in the Tuscanyset “Made in Italy.”
But he is also, in a sense, costarring with his mother, Natasha Richardson.
Although she died in 2009 after a freak skiing accident, Richardson said, he felt his mother’s presence on the film set. And certainly, she seems to be present in the story, written by firsttime director James D’Arcy.
“There was an energy on set that was very supportive and caring,” Richardson told The Chronicle from his Manhattan home. “It was the whole filming where I felt Mom, through the people involved.”
The dreamy, sundrenched film, available to stream beginning Friday, Aug. 7, is a pleasant escape about a father and son restoring a gorgeous villa, with the son falling in love with a young restaurant owner. All the while, the father and son are still dealing with the loss, years earlier in a tragic accident, of the woman who was their wife and mother.
So this seems to be a public way for reallife father and son to work through some grief. Richardson, who can also be seen in the new Amazon Prime series “Big Dogs,” agreed. He said he particularly remembers getting a call from his dad, who forwarded him the script.
“He said, ‘I want you to read this.
This is weird.’ Weird meaning how similar the story was to our lives and what we were going through,” recalls Richardson.
Speaking to The Chronicle from Rome, where he is acting in a British miniseries about Leonardo da Vinci, D’Arcy — best known to American audiences as Howard Stark’s butler, Edwin Jarvis, in Marvel’s TV series “Agent Carter” and in last year’s alltime boxoffice champ, “Avengers: Endgame” — said he conceived the story and began writing the script before Richardson’s death. In fact, he was working through some of his own issues at the time.
“My own father died when I was 6,” D’Arcy said. “So I think I wanted to connect with my father, although it was all very subconscious. I wanted to write something where we could talk about emotions.
“I was very hesitant to send the script to Liam at all, because I
thought he could be quite offended that I would do that. But he went the other way with it. He said, ‘Listen, this obviously really speaks to me. I would love to investigate the possibility of doing this with my son. I think we could bring something to it we couldn’t get otherwise.’ ”
Still, D’Arcy wanted to make it clear that “we were not making the RichardsonNeeson family story . ... We were making an entertainment.”
But for Richardson, the connection was there. He was 13 years old at the time of Natasha’s death, and when he decided to enter the family business, he chose to act using his mother’s last name rather than his birth name, Neeson. (Of course there’s acting royalty on the Richardson side of the family tree, including grandmother Vanessa Redgrave and greatgrandfather Michael Redgrave; his grandfather was director Tony Richardson and his godfather is actor Franco Nero.)
“She was a close friend, she was hospitable, she liked making people feel at home and comfortable,” Richardson said of his mother. “She also had a great sense of humor and an amazing laugh. She was quite magical.”
Natasha Richardson was known to be a warm and generous person on film sets, and her son said if people wanted to know what she was really like, her performance in Disney’s 1998 remake of “The Parent Trap,” in which she’s the mother of twin Lindsay Lohans, comes closest.
“That’s her, really,” Richardson said. “I’m so lucky to have that captured on film, because she was very much like that: a loving, funny mother.”
As for acting with his father, Richardson said, “we’re close friends, so we had a lot of fun on set. We fooled around; it was light.”
D’Arcy recalled one specific incident between takes that made him laugh.
“There was one fantastic moment when Micheál started giving Liam Neeson notes,” D’Arcy said. “‘No, Dad, Dad, Dad, do it like this. Your instincts were really good on that one take, you should try it like that,’ and Liam was like, ‘Really? You think so? OK, OK, sure.’
“I thought, ‘Wow! That is the first time another actor had dared to give Liam Neeson notes in the last 40 years!’ ”