Liam Neeson

Renowned for leading roles in serious movies like Schindler’s List – for which he was Oscar nominated – he now delights directors like Non Stop’s Jaume Collet–Serra with his ability to combine muscle and gravitas, his pedigree and talent shining through

'I love that little period of time between 'action' and 'cut'. And I'm always learning,' Liam Neeson
Liam Neeson has had a tough day.
Inside the battered cabin of a Boeing 767 he’s been slugging it out with a pair of hijackers with the screams of 140 terrified passengers ringing in his ears as the London bound jet plunges from the sky.
The interior of a real decommissioned aircraft, a shell with no wings or tail, bought specially for the thriller Non-Stop and rebuilt inside a studio on the outskirts of New York, has been his 'office' for weeks now and sits on top a giant gimbal that can rock like a giant cradle to mimic the turbulence of a plane at 30,000 feet.
Neeson plays a U.S. air marshal desperately trying to track down an on board killer who is threatening to blow up the plane.
'Working on this set is like crossing the Atlantic every day for 40 days,' notes Neeson as he greets us with a firm handshake.
'I’m getting a bit old for this.'
He’s joking. Now aged 61, Neeson has been Hollywood’s ‘go to’ action movie star ever since he played a ruthless CIA operative searching for his kidnapped daughter in Taken.
The film was a worldwide smash, earning $226 million at the box office and changing the course of Neeson’s already remarkable career.
He had loved the emotional heart of the story.
'It was about a guy who has to find his daughter and, of course, you’ll do anything for your child. But, still, at the back of my mind, I was thinking ‘it’s going to go straight to video..’
'That was totally fine by me because it was three months filming in Paris doing something I’d never done before, working with all these great stunt guys. I can do all that physical stuff. And I thought, ‘well, if I **** it up, it will go straight to video anyway.’

'I do a lot of power walking, jogging, I go to the gym when I can and I travel with kettle-bells,' said Liam
'But, then it became a hit and Hollywood started seeing me in a different way and I started getting action scripts. And it’s terrific. I love it. I’m 61, and I’m doing this.'
He looks a good 15 years younger. A gifted amateur boxer in his youth, his six-foot, four-inch frame is still lean and muscled, the result of daily workouts.
'I keep pretty fit,' he says. 'And, obviously, for these films you step it up.
'I do a lot of power walking, jogging, I go to the gym when I can and I travel with kettle-bells.
'They’re these various sized weights with big handles developed in Russia so you can use them for different things and it incorporates many exercises in just one movement. They’ve become huge in Los Angeles.'
He is surprised and delighted at the turn his career has taken.
Renowned for leading roles in serious movies like Michael Collins and Schindler’s List – for which he was Oscar nominated – he now delights directors like Non Stop’s Jaume Collet–Serra with his ability to combine muscle and gravitas, his pedigree and talent shining through.
Non-Stop is the perfect example. He plays Bill Marks, a former New York cop turned air marshal, the armed security guards who, since 9.11, have travelled incognito on U.S. planes.
'For him it’s almost like being a cop in a shopping mall,' says Neeson.
Marks is a man on a downward spiral, using alcohol to block out the tragedy that haunts him – the loss of his eight year old daughter to cancer – and his guilt that he wasn’t really there for her.
Neeson is painfully believable as Marks - a lost soul who only finds himself when called to action on the New York to London flight.
He starts receiving texts on his secure, air marshals only, phone, from someone threatening to kill one passenger every 20 minutes unless $150 million is paid into a specified account.
What follows is an edge of your (plane) seat thriller in which every passenger is a suspect.
'The script was so full of suspense that it was a total Non-Stop read,' he says. 'It held me in its grip from start to finish.'

It packs an emotional punch, too. It’s impossible to watch Neeson and not be reminded of the loss that he too, has suffered. His wife of fifteen years, the beautiful actress Natasha Richardson, died in 2009 after she suffered a head injury whilst skiing at the Mont Tremblant Resort near Montreal in Canada.
'Yes, you carry your life with you, everything that’s happened to you,' he says quietly. 'It’s here inside you and you bring that to the characters you play in some way.'
He married Natasha Richardson in 1994 and they settled in the States, with an apartment in Manhattan and a country retreat in upstate New York. It was clearly a happy marriage. He has rarely spoken of the tragedy although in an interview once he told how in the months after the accident, he was still in shock and life was a ‘blur.’
'It’s easy enough to plan jobs, to plan a lot of work,' he said. 'That’s effective. But that’s the weird thing about grief. You can’t prepare for it. You think you are going to cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work.
'It hits you in the middle of the night – well, it hits me in the middle of the night. I’m out walking. I’m feeling quite content. And it’s like suddenly, boom.'
The work, he says now, has helped him gain some equilibrium. Since Natasha’s death he’s made two or three films a year.
'Oh yes, absolutely it has helped,' he says. 'It’s been great and I know my wife would have wanted me to do that, you know, as long as my kids are OK and they are.
'And I’ve had extraordinary help from my family and friends and in that way, I’ve been very, very fortunate.'
He remains close to Natasha’s family, his mother-in-law Vanessa Redgrave and his sister in law Joely Richardson. He has two sons, Michael, 18, and Daniel, 17, both still at school. Being a father to them is an ‘on going joy.’

Would he be happy or worried if they decided to follow their parents into acting?
'A bit of both. The pressure would be more because they are the sons of celebrities.
'More might be expected because they have my surname and everyone knows who their mum was. But they’re not really throwing any shapes that way. Fortunately, they’re just busy being teenagers.'
After Event was given exclusive access to watch filming on Non-Stop in New York we meet again, just before the film’s release, at The Dorchester Hotel in London.
Neeson fills the room. He stands up, offers another handshake and asks how I am before folding himself into an armchair that seems too small for him. He’s polite, softly spoken; a gentle giant, who has become a movie hero, even if the hero is flawed, like Bill Marks.
'It’s important for actors to have something to hang a coat on,' he says.
'And I wouldn’t be any good as a straight, clean cut hero. I’m just not capable of that. You need shades in a character, maybe some darkness. And it’s nice if you’re able to bring some emotion to a role like Bill Marks that the audience can pick up on.'
The third of four children– he has three sisters – he was raised in Ballymena, Ireland, and was a keen boxer from the age of nine to 16.
'I was competent and I won a few championships,' he says, modestly.
In fact, he won three belts as Northern Ireland’s juvenile champion.
'I loved it and it taught me a lot of discipline. But I never had a killer instinct as a boxer.'
By the time he quit, Neeson already knew he wanted to act. He remembers applying to his local authority for a grant to study drama in England.
'I still have the letter somewhere,' he says, 'something to the effect that ‘we do not recognise drama schools as further education institutions.’ Period. So that was it.'
Instead, he attended Queen’s University in Belfast to study physics and post college he enrolled at a teacher training course in Newcastle before returning to Northern Ireland where he tried his hand at a variety of jobs. He ticks them off on his fingers.

'I drove a fork lift truck, I worked in a factory, I worked on a building site, I was a teacher for a while. I did a lot of that stuff.'
Still, he never gave up on his dream and was inspired by one of his heroes, the late Irish actor, Colin Blakely who had made it in England, both in movies like A Man for All Seasons and on stage at the National Theatre.
'I felt wow, it is possible. He played the part of (John) Proctor in The Crucible, directed by Laurence Olivier.
'As a teenager I read how Olivier had said that Colin’s performance was like ‘watching an oak tree grow on the stage.’
'I played the same part ten years ago on Broadway and I had ‘I must be an oak tree growing on stage’ written on my dressing room mirror. Colin showed me the way.'
After stage roles in Belfast his big break came when director John Boorman, spotted his talent and offered him the role of Sir Gawain in Excalibur.
'I remember being on set in a shiny suit of armour on a horse and there was Helen Mirren, and it was like ‘oh ****, this is great!’ It was so euphoric. And I also thought, ‘it’s never going to last, this feeling.’
After Excalibur Hollywood came calling. He’s worked with some of the very best directors – playing the German factory owner who saved countless Jews from the death camps in Spielberg’s Schlindler’s List, an Irish rebel leader in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, a priest in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and a Jedi master in George Lucas’ Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

Natasha Richardson died in 2009 after she suffered a head injury whilst skiing
Still, the insecurity of the struggling years never quite goes away.
'I still go through my house switching off lights if they’re on during the day,' he smiles.
'But I still adore the job itself and the thrill of a script arriving from a complete stranger who wants me to be in something.
'I have varying degrees of impatience with everything else, but I love that little period of time between ‘action’ and ‘cut’. And I’m always learning.'
There have been lessons in his private life too. In 2000 he suffered a broken pelvis when his Harley Davidson collided with a deer near his country home. He was thrown from the motorbike and landed in a ditch on the side of the road.
Neeson remarkably managed to crawl back to the road where a passing truck driver saw him and called an ambulance. As he lay unconscious in hospital doctors told his wife to prepare for the worst. He’s never ridden since.
'When it happened I sort of made a promise to God or whatever entity there may be.. 'Get me out of this and I’ll never touch these things again..’ I’ve got titanium bits in my body but really I’m in good shape. I had fantastic surgeons and access to one of the best hospitals in the world.
'After the operation you start doing the agonising physical therapy immediately. They said ‘do 10 minutes..’ and I did twenty. If they said ‘do twenty..’ I did forty and you just work through the pain.
'I knew I was doing Gangs of New York a few months later and I had a fight sequence with Dan Day Lewis. He kept coming to the hospital and though he’s my friend I knew he was checking me out. I thought ‘**** you, I’m going to get there!’ So that helped,' he laughs.
Despite entering his seventh decade he’s in remarkable physical condition and clearly loves the challenges of action sequences.
'Perhaps, it harks back to the boxing days,' he says. 'It’s another discipline and I’ve been I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from all these incredible stunt guys, including those on Non-Stop.'
In the movie, his character is a nervous flyer.
'Strangely, given his job, he’s a bit of an air-phobic. Plus, he picks the flight from hell,' he laughs.
Neeson leads an all star cast that includes Julianne Moore playing a mysterious passenger and Michelle Dockery, Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, who plays an air stewardess, Nancy. She becomes his only trusted ally.
Filming of the movie presented its own unique challenges, he says.
'Well, 99 percent of it is shot on board the plane itself.
'We’ve had a couple of days on location at JFK airport, but the rest of the action takes place in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a plane that’s flying at 40,000 feet and we’ve had a brilliant replica of the inside of the aircraft built in a New York studio to work in.
'It’s meant that Jaume has had to be very creative about he way that he’s filming, and has been using various special camera rigs.
'In one particular sequence we’ve filmed 10 pages of dialogue in one big take in which the camera follows me around, going from suspect to suspect.
'It was pretty intense but it was a wonderful feeling of achievement at the end of it.'
In one key scene, Neeson fights a suspect in the confines of an aircraft loo.
'To add to the problem, the other guy was quite big too,' he laughs.
'At one point I had to bash up against a mirror, which shatters during the fight. You’re not aware of being hurt at the time because the adrenaline kicks in.
'But you do see a bruise or two later on and think, ‘How did I get that?’


Non-Stop is out in cinemas from Feb 28