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Mania Interview: Liam Neeson

Liam Neeson
© Mania/Robert Trate

 Liam Neeson is every inch the gentle giant his reputation suggests: a tall, soft-spoken man with kind eyes who thinks his answers through before opening his mouth. He’d worked steadily as a supporting actor for many years before Steven Spielberg cast him as Oskar Schindler in 1993, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination and launched him into the annals of stardom. Since then, he’s played a Jedi, a magic lion, a Batman villain and the leader of the A-Team among other notable parts. That last gig put him in touch with director Joe Carnahan, who cast him as the lead in The Grey opening this Friday. It may rank as one of his strongest and most provocative performances… which he discussed with the media during a recent press conference for the film.

Question: This film is so harrowing…

Liam Neeson: Well, it’s not a chick flick that’s for sure. [Laughter]

Q: What draws you to characters like this, intense characters in intense situations?

LN: In this case, it was the script. Joe Carnahan gave it to me while we were on a publicity tour for The A-Team. I think Christian Bale was to play the role originally, or maybe Bradley Cooper. I’m not sure. In any case, I read it and it read like a 19^th Century epic poem, like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It touched on aspects of spirituality and Greek mythology. I thought, “Well this is right up my street.” And there’s no cars, there’s no technology, there’s no computers or iPhone. It’s just sparse. Man vs. nature and man vs. himself. That really got me.

Q: Do you think an older man in the role would give it more weight as far as his insight into death goes?

LN: I’m not sure. I honestly hadn’t considered it before now. But I turn sixty this year, so maybe my years give it an extra gravitas.

Q: How was being an older man in those conditions?

LN: Well you have to be in shape. That’s part of the job. My conditioning involved… I remember seeing a documentary about this crazy Brit who swims in the Antarctic from iceberg to iceberg. He started his training in London by standing under freezing-cold showers for ten minutes every morning. It immunizes your body for the extremes of cold. So I said, “I can do that.” I got up to seven minutes before it became too much. But it worked, it really worked. It was forty below the first week of the shoot up in Canada, so it came in handy. [Smiles impishly.] I didn’t tell anyone else about it, of course. You’ve got to maintain appearances.

Q: How important is shooting in conditions like that? With technology today, you can do it all on a sound stage in Burbank and convince us.

LN: I don’t think it can convince anyone. Not modern audiences. They’re very sophisticated and can spot CGI very quickly. If something’s real, you know it’s real and you experience it as real. There was no CGI here, at least as far as the weather and the setting goes. There was a little CGI with the wolves, but the weather was all real. You can’t fake that. Just getting from here to the end of the room in three feet of snow was like a three-hour workout. All you want to do is stay warm.

Q: Did you get to meet any real oil workers?

LN: A met a couple of guys who had the same job as my character: security guys protecting the other workers from wolves and bears.  I thought they’d be really tough motherfuckers. They turned out to be the most sensitive people, who hated to have to occasionally take down a wild animal preparing to attack some of those workers. It really surprised me.

Q: Was there any part of the film you found particularly challenging, either physically or emotionally?

LN: I was obviously concerned with the river sequence. I have a brilliant stuntman and he’s been a part of my life for many years, but there was a point when I was going to have to go into that river. And it’s a real river, with real rocks and rapids. There were guys downstream looking out for me, but it was a concern for all of us. In regards to the emotional aspects of the role, I wasn’t worried about that. I knew I could access something to convey the character’s feelings.

Q: Beyond the obvious differences in age, what do you look for in roles these days that you didn’t look for earlier in your career?

LN: At the moment, there’s a few of these assassin roles. Joel Silver and myself are probably going to do a couple of things in the next couple of years. Good Die Hard-type things. Hopefully my knees will hold out until then. But it’s really the same thing as it’s always been, which is a good script.

Q: You seem to be everywhere these days. Is your schedule hectic?

LN: It seems that way; I’ve got four or five coming out this year and it feels like a lot. But I get two or three months off in between, so it doesn’t feel hectic. I’m still touched that complete strangers will send me a script asking me to be in their films. That still bamboozles me. Every time I see Tony Hopkins, I hug him and ask him how he is. He says, “I haven’t been found out yet!” He’s a knight and he still worries. I’ll happily take busy over the alternative.

Q: How’s Wrath of the Titans looking? Sam Worthington has said he was very happy with the script.

LN: He was. He’s seen a cut of it and I haven’t but he’s very high on it.

Q: Do you get to do a lot as Zeus?

LN: Yeah, Zeus and Hades get up to a lot in this one. I can’t say more than that just now.

Q: There’s a story that a forklift driver convinced you to get into acting. Is that true?

LN: It is. I was a forklift driver in a Guinness factory my home town and this guy… he could make a forklift speak, he was so good. I was his apprentice. We were sitting and waiting for these cases of Guinness to come in so we could put them on palettes for storage. I had long hair down to here, I was twenty years of age. He said, “Liam how long are you going to stay here in this spot?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Don’t stay here long. What do you want to do in life?” I said, “Actually I want to be an actor.” He thought about it and said – in all sincerity – “So you want to be another Roy Rogers?” Out of all the actors in the world, he went right to Roy Rogers! But I knew what he meant and then he said, “Don’t stay here too long.” And that stuck with me to this day.