Why Liam Neeson Felt Embarrassed By The Script For One Of His Biggest Hits

When the trailer for “Taken” first started making the rounds in 2008, no one thought it was terribly out of character for Liam Neeson to star in a straight-ahead action flick. With films like “Darkman,” “Rob Roy” and “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” on his resume, the 1993 Best Actor nominee for “Schindler’s List” certainly seemed comfortable making genre movies. The surprise was the five years that led up to it. After failing to snag a well-deserved second Best Actor nomination for “Kinsey” in 2004, he segued to supporting parts in “Kingdom of Heaven,” “Batman Begins” and “Breakfast on Pluto,” which suggested he was either getting passed over for lead roles, didn’t fit the star type for whatever was being offered, or entering the character actor phase of his career.

After the moody Western “Seraphim Falls” failed to catch on with moviegoers (despite the intriguing pairing of Neeson and Pierce Brosnan), next up was “Taken.” Directed by Pierre Morel, who’d made a big action splash with the parkour-infused “District 13,” and produced by globally popular hitmaker Luc Besson, it had an irresistible hook in that Neeson monologue that played over the trailer (which, because the U.S. release was almost a year after the film made the rounds in Europe, became ubiquitous in theaters and online). His badass retired CIA agent Bryan Mills threatening the men who kidnapped his daughter with a “particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you” guaranteed a good, bloody time at the movies.

By the end of its theatrical run, “Taken” had grossed $227 million on a $25 million budget. Neeson had an action franchise if he wanted it, and he did. The “Taken” movies earned Neeson a load of money, and made him one of the most viable action leads in Hollywood, but the star always felt a little sheepish about this because, well, the script for the first movie was so silly.

In a 2022 interview with ScreenRant, Neeson revealed that he had a moment during the first week of shooting on “Taken” when he was confronted with the implausibility of the whole endeavor. Per Neeson:

“I had a driver when I was doing ‘Taken,’ the first ‘Taken’ movie 15 years ago I think it was, and we were shooting in LA for the first week, and at the end of the first week, my driver as he dropped me off at the hotel, he said, ‘I’ve started to read the script of ‘Taken,’ I’ve got to page 40. It says you’ve taken the lives of 26 people.’ I didn’t know how to answer that. I felt quite embarrassed. They said in such a way as if, ‘Are you sure you’ve read this script? Because you do nasty things to people.'”

Obviously, Neeson got over his embarrassment and made two more “Taken” movies, but he told Vanity Fair that, initially, he thought this would be a one-and-done gig. “I was very surprised by ‘Taken,'” he said. “I thought it was going to be a straight-to-video film. It was such a simple story.” He allowed that he sounded frightening in that trailer clip, but the whole undertaking still felt “corny” to him. “It was a cornball,” he said. “I really did feel that. It’s nice to be proven wrong.”

How wrong was Neeson? The three films combined to gross $929 million at the worldwide box office on reasonable budgets. Fortunately, Neeson found his way back to more serious work like Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” Steve McQueen’s “Widows” (where he thought he was miscast), and Neil Jordan’s “Marlowe.” Surely, there are still great performances to come, but before we get there we’re going to see Neeson tackle the silliest role of his career: police officer Frank Drebin in Akiva Schaffer’s “The Naked Gun.”