There’s a line from Anthony Hopkins that Liam Neeson likes to share. Any time Neeson asks him how he’s doing, Hopkins tells him, “Great. I haven’t been found out yet.”
At 73, Neeson feels like he hasn’t been found out yet either. Once dubbed the heir apparent to Sean Connery’s sweeping romantic grandeur, Neeson, with his broad trajectory and catalog of more than 100 Hollywood films, is arguably as interesting as any actor today. He can claim awards bait with “Schindler’s List” and “Michael Collins,” franchise blockbusters with “Star Wars Episode I — The Phantom Menace” and “Batman Begins” and fan favorites with “Love Actually” and “The Lego Movie.” And that’s before you consider the long list of action-film ass-kickers this Oscar- and Tony-nominated star has played, which established his identity for a generation of fans. That’s largely thanks to the surprising success of the “Taken” franchise, built around Neeson as a father with a very particular set of skills who will find you and kill you if you kidnap his daughter. It’s been a career that’s kept him and his viewers guessing at what might come next.
“I’m honestly not trying to change,” he said of all the changes. “It wasn’t deliberate, but there’s been a lot of this for me.”
Neeson says this inside the third-floor screening room at Paramount’s building in Times Square on a humid Tuesday afternoon in July. If you haven’t figured out why you can’t escape his face lately, it’s part of his next change: He is starring in “The Naked Gun,” the reboot of the crime-spoof comedy franchise from the ’80s and ’90s. The film will serve as a test for whether the brand of straight-man intensity that made Neeson an action-film favorite can translate to the level of laughs produced by Leslie Nielsen, his predecessor in the trilogy. (Neeson is playing Nielsen’s son, Frank Drebin Jr., in the film, which also stars Pamela Anderson and Paul Walter Hauser.)
“Liam is probably the only actor alive who in the 21st century could play Frank Drebin,” Seth MacFarlane, producer of “The Naked Gun,” said, noting that Neeson is a throwback to performers like Nielsen, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. “These were people who all had that gravitas that when you had them saying absurd things, it was just priceless since there was so much weight to what they were saying. We don’t make those kinds of actors in Hollywood anymore.”