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| Liam Neeson |
The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson
Tom Chiarella
15 February 2011
Originally published in the March issue
Liam Neeson and I last spoke a week before I wrote this sentence. At that time, I asked him what he remembered about the interview I'd done with him at a restaurant in New York almost three weeks before that. He said, "I remember you told me that story about your accident, and that was pretty hard for you. I remember that you made me draw that picture of my house, and I remember that we talked about Natasha. I started to worry: Why would I tell him that? Why did I speak about the hospital? And then I thought, No, he's a man. This is not some newspaper story. So I wasn't sorry. Except about your accident. That was bloody awful."
Then Liam Neeson asked me what I remembered about the interview. I echoed him: "You told me about your accident. You told me about your wife's accident. That was hard for you. You were upset. You got very quiet. So I traded stories. I told you something bad that happened to me. I have the picture of your house right here. I remember that your hand was shaking."
"You have to be careful," he told me, "in how you describe it." I told him that was my job, to be careful with descriptions.
Just two days before that, Liam Neeson called from the Caribbean, at the end of a holiday. "I'm remembering some things I said," he told me. The phone signal was breaking up. It sounded to me like he was speaking on a satellite phone; I pictured him crouched in the body of a small plane. I scratched a note — plane? — as we spoke. "I don't know if you've written the piece yet," he said. "I don't know if you'll even remember what I'm worried about."
Neeson was concerned that we had discussed the politics of his native Northern Ireland. The Troubles. "I always forget," he told me, "that I can still make it hard for my family there by saying something stupid in the press." Then he asked to reword one point — to change one word. I told him that I didn't think the IRA would receive mention in the piece. "I still have to be careful," he said, before the phone crackled loud enough that I had to pull it away from my ear. "I have to make it my job to be careful with my family."
He didn't thank me. He didn't care if I used the quote. He just wanted to clarify that word. We made arrangements to talk in two days. Then I told him I'd seen him on TV during halftime at the Knicks — Heat game, that he looked good, that he looked happy. He told me a story about that interview, about his son, who was at the game with him. Then the phone died.
I forgot to ask him whether he was on a small plane or not.
Two weeks before, after our interview at the restaurant was over, Liam Neeson took his fourteen-year-old son to the Knicks — Heat game at Madison Square Garden, LeBron James's first game in New York since moving to Miami. They sat courtside. At the same time, I was having dinner with my son and his friend at a lousy little sushi place on Twenty-third Street. During that dinner, my brother texted me: "Your boy Liam Neeson is being interviewed at the Knicks game." So I excused myself and went to the bar for a look.
There he was, holding the same bright-blue scarf that he'd worn to our lunch. I could not hear him, but he looked happier than he had when we'd left each other. He's tall, seemingly born into a black trench coat, but thinner than he looks on television. The thing with his face is, he looks past you when he speaks. It's not that he can't make eye contact, because he can, and he does, but he reserves looking directly at you, as if the distance marauds him in particular. It makes him look perpetually concerned. This is why he played so well that stern, top-dog Greek god in Clash of the Titans, the wrathful father-assassin in the surprise action-hit Taken, and how in a little over three decades, he's played every type of epic ass-kicker from Gawain to Valjean, Oskar Schindler to Michael Collins. It's the face that's still allowing him to stack up movies years ahead of time, with roles and reprises, stretching well into the coming decade. A beguiling longevity, since 1) he's fifty-eight, and 2) his wife, Natasha Richardson, died unexpectedly in an apparently benign skiing accident just two years ago. It's the look Neeson's shooting over the shoulder of the interviewer at the Knicks game, in the same interview he tells me about later, from somewhere in the Caribbean, maybe from a plane.
"I had to do it, Tom, because they gave me those tickets," he says. "Because, well, you just get nothing for nothing, right?" Neeson speaks with more brogue than you'd expect, and somehow less, so that the same word — nothing — sounds both hissed and sung in the same sentence. "And before we go on the air, the woman says to me, 'I'm going to throw you a question, something like, "Mr. Neeson, if Star Wars is on one channel and Schindler's List is on the other, which one do you watch?"' And oh, but that gets me started. I mean, I start to tell her, one represents six million people, six million lives, the other is just, just ..." — and here he climbs the word as he says it — "fantasy! But then my boy steps in and — he's so smart — says, 'Excuse me, ma'am. Why don't you say Star Wars on one channel and Taken on the other?' That's what made me happy. And I looked that way, because right before I went on, my son, he can see I'm still aggravated, so he just steps up to me and says, 'Smile, Dad, smile.' And that's my bonny boy. His mother just shines through him at moments like that."
Unknown. That's the last word he says to me, at the conclusion of the interview. It's the name of his latest movie, another gritty Euro action-thriller, this one set in Berlin. It's the punch line of a joke I've been using since we started two and a half hours earlier: I still don't know the name of your movie. It's listed as Unknown.It's not that funny. As he walks away, he curls the fluorescent-blue scarf around his neck. I yell to him, "I still don't know the name of your movie." He smiles, tugs on the scarf, says it: "Unknown!" and then turns to face the cold. I think two things just then: 1) Not a bad ending, and 2) that's a funny scarf. Too blue, too demonstrative and visible. The guy wants to be unseen. He just told me as much, with a story about his dead wife's poodle. It must be one of those soccer scarfs from England. I bet those are his favorite Premier League team's colors. He's promised me a follow-up call in two weeks. I make a note to ask him about that scarf.
Apparently, Liam Neeson grew up in a box.
That's how he draws it, anyway, on my pad, in the restaurant with half an hour to go in the interview. Four lines, four right angles. "Little box," he says. "Three up, three down." His childhood home.
"That's it, then," he says.
It's a box.
He had asked me what I was working on, what I'd been drawing when he arrived at the restaurant. I showed him the pages of my sketch pad; I've been drawing maps of every place I ever lived. Pictures of the rooms, houses, blocks, neighborhoods. As the interview wound down, he paged through them, asked me questions about my memory of sun porches and closets I haven't seen since 1967. The experiment of memory appeals to him. "What does this do for you? Does it improve your memory some?"
Nah. Since the only things I can remember are places, it's more like a record. It doesn't sharpen anything. Not for me. It just passes the time. By then, I know I'm acting like Neeson, who is dismissive of memory while still possessed by it. He fooled me at first, too, into believing that he'd disconnected from the past, by pretending he couldn't remember. But by the time I handed him a pencil and asked him to draw the house he grew up in, he'd told me stories for two hours, in great and gory detail: the boxing that took him to sixteen. The jobs he'd held — forklift driver in a Guinness factory, training to be a teacher, blueprint maker for an architect. His motorcycle accident. The journey to see his dying wife. This guy ... he remembers.
After he draws that box, he attaches another right next to it.
What else?
There's a whole series of them this way.
So row houses?
Yeah.
Where were the windows?
Up here, like this.
Where was your room?
I had a little box room, right up here. My sister slept over here, my parents were in the back. This was the first-floor front window. I mean, it was tiny.
Did it have a little flower box under the window?
No. (He draws some more.) This was a little garden. Let me see. (More drawing. Rapidly now.) Pathway onto the main pavement, a street here, just a tiny little street. See? Tiny little garden.
Flowers or vegetables?
Ah, Dad had a little border. Flowers here, grass there. Next-door neighbor had the same thing, you know?
What's that building?
That was our coal shed. And this part was a little shared piece of ground, only about as big as this table and that. The next-door neighbor tried to make a little walkway out of it, to our coal shed. And our coal shed was their coal shed, too.
What color was the house?
Pebbled ash white.
And the roof?
Slate.
And behind this was the city?
Ballymena. Thirty miles from Belfast. This was Corlea Gardens, where we lived. Wait. No, this is wrong. (He erases a door, starts in again.) Because there was a drainpipe here. A little gutter. I climbed up it because sometimes Dad would say, If you're not back by a certain time, I'm locking the door. I mean, this was the sixties, seventies, when Northern Ireland was something else.
Scary?
Ya, see I was always able to scoot up right here. I forgot about that.
It's good. You're good. You're a good draw-er.
This is what he drew:
I actually said that: "draw-er." I considered the term artist, and then decided no, this can't be called art, so what came out of my mouth was the diction of a kindergartner: draw-er. At this point, Liam Neeson, with his black, black eyes, his eternal scruff of hair, his shoulders roped in muscle, did an unbearably good — like Jedi-master good, like Bob Newhart good — double take. For me or at me, I could not say.
It's a good exercise, he said, of the drawings. It really is.
The interview was clearly almost over. I tapped the drawing, put my finger right in his father's garden.
Did you have a dog?
Just like that, the spell of the past is broken. Neeson answers in the now, in his present. "I do," he says, having misheard me, as if I know the story already. "And it's a thing I'm into just now."
Neeson orders more pinot noir. A bottle. Apparently, the interview is not almost over. After it arrives, he continues: "It's Natasha's dog. A tiny, tiny little poodle. And I don't like walking it. I don't want my picture taken walking in the park with her poodle. Too dramatic, too sad. It's her dog. Hers. And people know that. So ..." he says, raising an eyebrow here impossibly high. For me and at me, I know. "It's a thing for me just now," he says, ticking out a small dark laugh.
There is a pause then. We've gotten used to this by now. There were many such pauses in the hour prior to this one, as Neeson told the story of Richardson's death, related her absence in the life of his family. In some ways, he's agreed to this interview to begin to tell the story, and it can't be easy. He agreed to it once before, a year and a half ago, more, canceling at the last moment. Neeson uses these silences to collect himself. In these moments his eyes look empty and sad, but I'd be a damned liar if I didn't say that I at least considered the fact that the guy is an actor, that I'd been watching these eyes for thirty years now — sad eyes — and that I recognized that no one gives that kicked-in-the-head-by-fate look better than Liam Neeson. Whether or not I believed the depth of what's going on for him is irrelevant. I did. I do. All I can see at the moment is that it really is going on.
This time, he comes out of the silence with a slight grin. "We have a farm upstate," he says, leaning forward a bit, picking up his wineglass without the least bit of theater or pretense. "The thing nobody knows is, that dog and I are like this." He knits his fingers. "She knows. She knows. I mean she knows. As soon as we're out of the city, she's up in the front seat of the car, up in my lap, and she never leaves my side. She waits, Tom. I swear it. And we're all over that farm, this little poodle and me. Everywhere. She's like a working dog up there. She's given herself over completely. She's just a damned good dog." And this is the moment — late in the meal, late in the afternoon — when Neeson looks like what he is, what Richardson herself was: an ex-smoker. He is a man in deep need of a timely terminal exhale to punctuate this story, to separate himself from the next thing he says, now thrice repeated. "That's why it's a thing for me just now."
One hour earlier, he tells the story of a motorcycle accident he lived through in 2000. This riffing off a discussion of fear, of getting knocked out cold in the ring as a teenager; of the fearsome IRA legend Michael Collins, whom he played in the movie; fear upon leaving Belfast for Dublin and Dublin for London; fear upon leaving London for L.A. and L.A. for New York — none of it sounds really scary. It's just fear as abstraction, fear as thesis statement. Sounds like a guy looking back and marking time.
I'm looking at him — ticking off the prisoner in him, the sailor, the knight, the scientist, the samurai master, the lighthearted commander of the A-Team, the betrayed husband, the husband betrayer, the priest, the hero of the oppressed, the Lion God, the Jedi — thinking, This guy is afraid of only one thing: recounting, revisiting, returning to the most awful thing. The recent past scares him, which is why, right up to the moment he starts to tell the following story, he's a little hazy, a smidge reluctant to detail his memories. That's how it is, right up until he says:
You have to know, one wet leaf can ruin you.
Th' deer come out of nowhere. Front paws straight up the handlebars.
Look at me. I'm riding like this — you're the deer. We're face-to-face. And your legs are in the spokes.
My peripheral vision sees this grassy verge with trees, and I'm wanting to pull over. It was amazing. Not a car in sight. I should have just slammed on the brakes, put the thing up on its stand, and quit. For some reason I wanted to get off the road. And of course it wasn't a horizontal verge at all. It was downhill, twelve feet, and there were a couple of sapling trees. Me and the bike and the deer slid down. The bike broke in half. The deer rolled farther down into a ditch, where if I had gone, no one would have ever found me. I gradually pulled myself up and got to the side of the road. I took off my jacket, and I sat there listening to this deer making this awful sound. And I was laughing and I was crying, and I looked down at this leg, and it was getting bigger, my jeans were getting tighter, so I knew I'd done something. But I thought it might not be much. Hoped. This man on a truck, full of muck, stopped and called the authorities. They got me to a local hospital, and I got this gorgeous shot of morphine. But I'd broken my pelvis in two places. My local doctor arranged for transfer to Lenox Hill Hospital in the city, and when I got there, they had called my wife.
I found out later they'd told her I wouldn't last the night. Well, they never fucking told me that.
She was shooting, up in Canada, and she came straightaway to the city. So eight hours later, after the bleeding's stopped, I wake up in the operating room, before they start the procedure, and it was like a TV movie: five little heads looking down at me, and among them was my wife's. And I said, What the fuck are you doing here? She said, They called me, I drove down from Canada.
Then afterwards, it's funny, because afterwards — this is weeks afterwards — Natasha and I, we'd get into an argument. I'd try and replay it back. And obviously the time is over in some way, it's behind you, but the chronology of events — but everything I remembered happening was very large. I couldn't understand something. I said, Darlin', if they told you I wasn't going to last the night, why'd you not get a priest in? I said, I know I'm a lapsed Catholic, but at least give me the last rites, you know? She said, Had I told you, then you would have known that you might be dying.
That's a fair point, I suppose. I had to get my head round that logic. At the same time, I coulda died and it woulda been nice to get a little of the old extreme unction, as it's called. All the oils.
Ten years ago, 2000. Terrible thing.
This was exactly halfway into the interview, when he tells this story. Precisely. And of course, I'm working backward here, from the end of the story to its start. So of course I know where that middle is, and Liam Neeson did not. But even in that moment, this story felt like the middle of things. We both knew that his accident was over long ago, so far in the past that there was no longer anything to fear. But he tells it as if it were still a dreadful thing.
But the details of the story — one spouse working on a film in Canada, an accident, a seemingly benign injury, increasing complications, the last-moment arrival at what might be the moment of death — stand too close in their telling not to bring to mind the end of Natasha Richardson, who died after a minor fall during a skiing lesson, while Neeson was in Toronto, filming Chloe. And just then, it seems, I have the lousy duty of pointing that out.
"It all sounds so much like your wife's accident," I say. "Ten years. Then she has this awful accident. You must have felt like all of it had been reversed."
On the recording, at this juncture, there is a giant rush of noise in the already noisy restaurant, like a sudden storm of silverware. In retrospect, it seems possible that this may be because Liam Neeson — Zeus-like — shakes his head, or because he refuses to speak. He says, "I can't. It's ... I'm too vulnerable, Tom. I can't go there."
I tell him I'm sorry. We pause. "It's brutal," I say. "Just brutal." Then I pause again. "I'm glad, though, that ..." The sentence goes unfinished. I can't remember what I was glad about.
Then he is quiet for a full minute. And oddly, the restaurant grows steadily quieter, too, on the recording, as if the chatter and gnash of silver and china simmers down precisely so that weeks later I can hear the occasional tick of Liam Neeson's tears on a plate, or a saucer, or whatever it is that sits in front of him as he thinks through what he is about to say. Tick. Tick. Long pause. Tick. Just like that.
And then, suddenly, he goes on: "No, no. It's ironic, I know. There I am up in Canada, doing a movie." Just as she was when he had his accident. This time, Neeson himself flew with her to New York, also to Lenox Hill Hospital, where she died.
Liam Neeson looks right at me then, as if remembering something specific, as if it just occurred to him, though this cannot be. "I'll tell you one thing," he says. "I'd been to Montreal maybe twice before. And for some reason, I thought the city's this size." He holds his hands out in front of him then, cupped like he is drinking water.
"I thought that it was this little comfortable little city," he says. "And for some reason, I thought the hospital that I was in a taxi racing toward was gonna be a nice little hospital, about twice the size of this restaurant. But it was this huge, glassy, black place. A Dickensian place, Tom.
"I walked into the emergency — it's like seventy, eighty people, broken arms, black eyes, all that — and for the first time in years, nobody recognizes me. Not the nurses. The patients. No one. And I've come all this way, and they won't let me see her. And I'm looking past them, starting to push — I'm like, Fuck, I know my wife's back there someplace. I pull out a cell phone — and a security guard comes up, starts saying, 'Sorry, sir, you can't use that in here,' and I'm about to ask him if he knew me, when he disappears to answer a phone call or something. So I went outside. It's freezing cold, and I thought, What am I gonna do? How am I going to get past the security?
"And I see two nurses, ladies, having a cigarette. I walk up, and luckily one of them recognizes me. And I'll tell you, I was so fucking grateful — for the first time in I don't know how long — to be recognized. And this one, she says, 'Go in that back door there.' She points me to it. 'Make a left. She's in a room there.' So I get there, just in time. And all these young doctors, who look all of eighteen years of age, they tell me the worst." He purses his lips, mouth dry. "The worst."
This is the point where he stops again. He blinks back tears, takes a long look at the table across from us, where members of Natasha Richardson's extended family are, coincidentally, having lunch in this same restaurant. (He and Natasha, this was their place, so it's only a mild coincidence.) I wait. Again, I tell him how sorry I am. Neeson nods. That's when I tell him something horrible that happened to me.
He went back to shooting Chloe, after the funeral. "I just think I was still in a bit of shock," he says. "But it's kind of a no-brainer to go back to that work. It's a wee bit of a blur, but I know the tragedy hadn't just really smacked me yet."
Now the no-brainer is staying with the work, the good work, as it piles up on him. "I think I survived by running away some. Running away to work. Listen, I know how old I am and that I'm just a shoulder injury from losing roles like the one in Taken. So I stay with the training, I stay with the work. It's easy enough to plan jobs, to plan a lot of work. That's effective. But that's the weird thing about grief. You can't prepare for it. You think you're gonna 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. It's like you've just done that in your chest." Here Neeson reaches out and twists both hands in opposite directions, like he's corkscrewing two ends of a soda can, reaches toward me so it's clear: This is in his chest. He shakes his head at the thought of this one thing, this single hideous bead on the necklace of his life. He speaks as if he were regarding its cruelty anew, though this too cannot be. He's too smart to feel singled out by what happened to his wife. Her death, with its painfully curious timeline — the simple fall, her apparent clearheadedness, followed by the swift, merciless brain hemorrhage? Brutal and extraordinary. Neeson's experience at the hospital — the mix-up at reception, the chaos of the ER, the arrival of the security guard? Vivid and, at the same time, banal. Just another hospital story; everyone has them. This doesn't mean they don't hurt. When he says, "It's just extraordinary," Neeson is referring to the persistent depth of pain, the ruinous visitations of grief, even now, two years later. That stuff is all his very own.
At the start, in the first few minutes of the interview, Liam Neeson is chatty about his upcoming work. He's leaving in two weeks, right after his family holiday, for Vancouver, to begin shooting The Grey, which he declares to be "Jack London meets Jaws." He's got a new movie opening soon. Cue the joke. "Yeah," I say, pretending to check my notes. "What's that movie called? No one seems to be able to tell me."
"Unknown," he says.
"You too, eh? I thought for sure they would tell you."
He laughs, at me and with me, probably. I cannot be sure.
He's just finished shooting Battleship, which his costar Brooklyn Decker described to me as a "naval war, with aliens." Neeson says that's about right. "I'm the admiral of the fleet. But get this, I was in Belfast this summer, visiting my family, and my agent kept calling me, saying, Have you read that? Are you ready? And I said for what now? The shooting isn't till December. And he said no, no, no. It's Sep-tember. They need you this coming Wednesday! I'd completely let it slip my mind.
"So I spoke to the director, as he was shooting a scene I was supposed to be in, and I thought, Christ, they're working, they really need me already. Anyway, I flew out there, to Hawaii, and I was onboard the USS Missouri the next day, dressed up in these naval whites, and all these sailors givin' it this." He gives a firm but unexaggerated salute in the middle of the restaurant.
Just as he lowers his hand, a besweatered family approaches and greets him. He introduces us. This is his wife's family: one of Lynn Redgrave's daughters. Some former muckety-muck in British politics. Sundry other cousins. They exchange hugs with him.
It feels a little like a setup, as if they timed the arrival, and my first thought was that he might want to include them in our lunch as a means of not talking — or perhaps talking — about his wife's untimely death. "Do you want them to join us?" I mutter, as they find their seats near us. He widens his eyes and shakes his head.
I pull out my pad and show him a chart I made, graphing his roles. The y-axis: "power." The x-axis: a measurement of the degree to which the character appeals to men or women. He laughs at the reaches of it. Aslan on top, Ethan Frome below. Qui-Gon Jinn to the left, sensitive widower from Love Actually on the right. My plotting amuses him. "So many characters," he says. "I can't even remember some of these." Forgetting, he tells me, is rapidly becoming one of his problems.
Our lunch is set for 1:00 P.M., but I get there at 11:00, a little worried about a mix-up or a cancellation. So I sit at the bar of the restaurant and wait. To pass the time, I take out my pad, draw a schematic of the first house my parents bought: Westminster Road, Rochester, New York. It frustrates me that I can remember the location of the powder room, which I never used as a boy, but I can't remember if there were flower boxes beneath the windows I often climbed into at night. What the hell can I remember, and why? I write that very thing at the top of the page because it seems like a good question to ask Liam Neeson. Below that I make a list of what he's done. I start a graph of the characters he's played.
Five hundred forty-seven days before that, Liam Neeson is supposed to meet me for lunch. Same restaurant, same setup. But just before noon that day in 2009, as I'm walking to the meeting, he cancels. When I mention this later, Neeson remembers. "That was you? I'm sorry about that, Tom," he says. "Truly. That was my mistake. I shouldn't have said yes in the first place. It was too fresh. I just wasn't ready."
The agenda for that 2009 meeting? Taken, a surprise hit. Clash of the Titans, a surefire popcorn movie. Maybe even some discussion of his continuing role in The Chronicles of Narnia, since, in essence, he is the voice of God. Liam Neeson has a lot of work coming up. And while no one is sure if he is ready, there is the sense that I have to ask him about his wife's death after a seemingly benign skiing accident.
That was a year and a half ago. More. In the days leading up to that meeting, the one that never happened, I dreaded the questions I needed to ask him.
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