Liam Neeson has been one of those names that can jump between all sorts of films – from awards dramas, to serious filmmaking with some major auteurs, to gritty genre vehicles and blockbusters aplenty.
If you want a mentor character for your big budget feature’s hero, or an action hero for your low-mid budget revenge film, Neeson has been the go-to choice for much of the past two decades.
Neeson’s not getting any younger though and, speaking with ET Online this week, he says he’s reached a point where certain roles just don’t seem interest him anymore. Asked if he would return to the superhero genre, which he appeared in for Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins”, he says:
“I’m really not a huge fan of the genre. I think it’s Hollywood with all the bells and whistles and the technical achievements and stuff – which I admire – but I have no desire to go into the gym for three hours every day to pump myself up to squeeze into a Velcro suit with a cape.
It’s just not my genre, it really isn’t. The first ‘Star Wars,’ I was in that, that was 22 years ago, and I enjoyed that, because it was novel and that was new. I was acting to tennis balls, which were ultimately going to be little fuzzy furry creatures and stuff. That was interesting, acting-wise, to try and make that seem real, but that was the last. It’s quite exhausting.”
Neeson certainly isn’t giving up action just yet – he’s been filming the crime thriller “Honest Thief,” will play Raymond Chandler’s famed detective Philip Marlowe in a noir piece, and is currently shooting a “Wages of Fear in the Arctic”-esque tale “The Ice Road” for filmmaker Jonathan Hensleigh.
