Playboy Interview: Liam Neeson

Exceptional actor and eloquent Irish talker that he is, Liam Neeson has described his profession as an "ancient craft of rogues and vagabond make-believers." The fact that he can toss off such a phrase sets him apart from most of today's actors, not to mention today's movie stars, who are apt to define ancient history as their last flop, agent or spouse. But Neeson's distinctions encompass more than his silver tongue, his massive physique--once a promising amateur boxer, he stands 6'4"--and his lightly ironic, slightly rueful sense of himself as a working stiff-cum-certified celebrity. His moving portrayal of Oskar Schindler, the flamboyant yet complex hero of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," earned him an Oscar nomination. He won the role after Spielberg saw him in the 1993 Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie"--opposite Natasha Richardson, who is now his wife--and was struck by his powerful, lyrical presence as the drunken, seafaring coal stoker Mat Burke.

Neeson, a native of Northern Ireland, has made his presence felt in American entertainment for a decade. He played the deaf-mute Vietnam vet in "Suspect" as a passionate soul trapped in a damaged body, then brought a similar quality to the older, crippled Ethan Frome in the PBS adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel. Devotees of stylish pulp cherish "Darkman," a fantasy-thriller in which Neeson's supersmart scientist, Peyton Westlake, turns into a supertwisted avenger after being disfigured by an acid bath. Starring opposite Jodie Foster and Natasha Richardson in "Nell," he is a country doctor who discovers and tries to protect a young woman who has been raised apart from civilization. In Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," his romantic, plainspoken Irishman clearly tells the truth when he proclaims to the woman he loves: "I'm from a different era." Romantic passion also rules the roost in "The Good Mother," in which he plays an Irish sculptor opposite Diane Keaton. His appearance earlier this year as an American sculptor--and Meryl Streep's husband--in "Before and After" lent authority to a thinly written flop. The same is true of his work as an honest sheriff in "Leap of Faith," a comedy about a phony evangelist. The movie, with Steve Martin and Debra Winger, was supposed to be a big hit, but no one told the audience.

"Rob Roy," the story of the swashbuckling Scottish Highlander, displays Neeson's physical and dramatic gifts to greater advantage. That movie was one answer to the question of what an actor can do to follow an artistic and commercial success such as "Schindler's List." The next answer has come with "Michael Collins," a large-scale biography of the Irish Republican hero, which opened in theaters this fall.

Neeson was born in 1952 in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. His father, now deceased, was a school custodian, and his mother worked as a cook in the public school system. Neeson had planned to teach school and studied physics, computer science, math and drama at Queen's University, Belfast. But drama carried him off from a career in academia. In 1976 he joined the Lyric Players Theater in Belfast. Two years later he moved to the venerable Abbey Theater in Dublin, where he appeared in Brian Friel's "Translations." He won an acting award for his work in Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars" at the Royal Exchange Theater.

Neeson's screen work started when director John Boorman saw him playing Lennie in a Dublin production of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and cast him as Sir Gawain in the 1981 "Excalibur." That led to a string of performances in TV movies and TV series in the United Kingdom and the U.S., then to roles in such feature films as "The Bounty" (Roger Donaldson's remake of "Mutiny on the Bounty"), Andrei Konchalovsky's "Duet for One," "A Prayer for the Dying" with Mickey Rourke and Bob Hoskins, and Roland Joffe's "The Mission," in which he plays a Jesuit priest. But his American career didn't take off until the mid-Eighties, when he made the fateful decision to move to Hollywood.

Success has transformed Neeson's life, but not so much as have marriage and fatherhood. He and his wife have a one-year-old son, Micheal, who is named after both Collins and Natasha's grandfather, Sir Michael Redgrave (her mother is Vanessa Redgrave, her father the late director Tony Richardson). They were expecting another child as this interview was being prepared. A few short years ago Neeson was a loner in the movie business with a house in Laurel Canyon, a reputation for solid professionalism and a powerful way with women, especially women who were smart, beautiful and/or famous. Gossip columnists linked him romantically to Helen Mirren, Brooke Shields, Sinéad O'Connor, Barbra Streisand and Julia Roberts.

Today he's a devoted family man who makes his home in Manhattan. He still has a reputation for solid professionalism, but in his movies also conveys sex appeal and such rare intangibles as kindness and decency.

We asked Joe Morgenstern, film critic for "The Wall Street Journal," to meet with the actor in New York. Here is his report:

"Liam Neeson has certainly accepted his success, even embraced it. For all his old-country dislike of Hollywood excess, I sense that he gets a kick out of turning up at Morton's for Oscar festivities, in Las Vegas for prizefights or at the White House for adventures in the politics of culture. At the same time, he seems to be searching for some sort of bump-up in professional status. It has nothing to do with conventional ambition but with a yearning, perhaps, for wider acceptance than he imagines he has achieved. He seems compelled to explore questions rather than spin or deflect them. Not that this makes him eager to talk with reporters. He's been burned in the past by things he's said about various women in his life, or by things he never said but that were attributed to him all the same. When we discussed getting together for this interview, he insisted that the subject of women was off the table; he's a husband and a father now, a man who speaks lovingly of his family.

"On one of our two days together we had a late lunch in an elegant restaurant on the Upper West Side. By the time our conversation wound down it was almost four o'clock, at which point two women came in for tea. They filed past our table without a glance, unaware of Neeson's presence. As soon as they sat down they started talking about movies, and during a lull in our own conversation we heard one of them say: 'I don't want to be entertained. That's why I loved "Schindler's List."' Neeson grinned wryly but said nothing."

[Q] Playboy: You are playing Michael Collins. Who was he, and who did you think he was when you were growing up in Northern Ireland?

[A] Neeson: He was a figure who was talked about in hushed conversation. You have to understand how it was then. I remember visiting my grandparents when I was eight years of age. They lived in Waterford, which is Republic of Ireland, and I lived in the North. I'd want to play with the kids in the street, but there were occasions when they wouldn't play with me because I was from the "Black North," as it was known. Because I "paid homage to the Queen."

[Q] Playboy: They thought that you were English?

[A] Neeson: They thought everyone from the North was English. I was staggered by that. I would tell my grandmom, "They're not playing with me because I look a queen or something." It was around that time when I started hearing about Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera, who became president of the Irish Republic. When I got into my teens, and especially after my one year at university, I started studying Irish history on my own and found out who Michael Collins was. I was immediately attracted to him because his potential had been cut off in the prime of life. He was so capable and so dynamic.

[Q] Playboy: How old was he when he died?

[A] Neeson: He was shot on August 22, 1922; he would have been 32 that October. He was the first man in Ireland's history to sit down and negotiate a treaty with England. And at that time the English cabinet was the crème de la crème of politicians: Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, these staggering men! And in comes this big country lad from west Cork who brought the British Empire to its knees in Ireland through a series of master espionage strokes.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds like a hero right out of the movies.

[A] Neeson: In Dublin you can buy posters of Michael Collins dressed as the commander in chief of the Irish Army. He looks like a typical hero in his uniform with his gun in a holster hanging low. But he was a statesman, a pen pusher. That's where his brilliance was, in financial organization. When he became leader of the government after the Anglo-Irish treaty was signed in 1921, he wore that uniform I think six more times in his life. And he was the opposite of De Valera, who produced, I feel, an Ireland that was conservative, very Catholic and quite inward-looking. Collins wanted to put Ireland in the world.

[Q] Playboy: Yet the paradox is that Collins was the one who agreed to the partition.

[A] Neeson: Well, he was hoodwinked by a masterful British cabinet. They were going to appoint a boundary commission a few months after the signing, but it never happened. So he was hoodwinked. Brilliantly so. But he got a free state that eventually did become a republic. Even though his friends turned against him and called him a traitor and said, "You should have come back with a republic," he said, "Look, the republic was never on the negotiating table. They would never have given us that, but what we have is freedom. These people, these occupying forces, are going to leave. We're going to have autonomy, and from there we can achieve a republic. Please see it as a stepping-stone." He was perfectly right, and he did this all at the age of 31.

[Q] Playboy: He was always controversial, wasn't he?

[A] Neeson: He was the most wanted man in Europe. Dublin back then, in the Twenties, was basically a big village. There was a curfew from ten at night until seven the next morning. Yet Collins always insisted on wearing steel toe caps on his shoes so that when he walked there was a loud click.

[Q] Playboy: So he'd be noticed?

[A] Neeson: Yes. He was inspired by a book by G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, about an organization that meets out in the open and is about to overthrow the government. He read the book and said, "That's the way--don't be covert and sneak around in shadows." So he dressed as a civil servant and rode around on a bicycle, and he whistled and stopped at checkpoints. He would talk with soldiers and offer them cigarettes--and he was the guy that they were looking for!

[Q] Playboy: So it wasn't just a matter of defiance or megalomania, it was political consciousness.

[A] Neeson: Absolutely. And it was a superb strategy that worked. I mean, he avoided capture.

There's a great story about when he went to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting. Everybody was taking his photograph and it really pissed him off. He said, "Now we have no ace up our sleeve. Before this I was the Scarlet Pimpernel. Nobody knew what I looked like. Now my fucking face is all over the place. So these talks have to succeed."

[Q] Playboy: How was he received by the British?

[A] Neeson: Most cabinet members wouldn't shake hands with any of the Irish delegates, but Lloyd George did. He stood at the entrance to the cabinet room and shook their hands and showed them where they were to be seated. That was the gesture the delegates were happiest with, shaking hands with the prime minister and not having to shake hands with the rest of them. But once they all get seated and they're all eyeing one another and wondering who's who, Collins asks, "Where's the men's room?"

As a butler shows Collins where the men's room is, Winston Churchill, who was at that time the minister of armaments, says, "So that's Michael Collins?"

Churchill goes out to have a pee too, and while he's at the urinal, he says, "So you're Mr. Collins."

"You're Mr. Churchill."

At that time, there was a price tag on Collins' head for £10,000, which was a fortune. And Churchill said to him, "Why, when I was your age, Mr. Collins, there was a price tag on my head of £20,000."

And Collins, without missing a beat, said, "I'm sure, Mr. Churchill. Everyone knows you're twice the man I am."

And left the men's room.

[Q] Playboy: Yet many people would say that Collins had a price tag on his head because he was a terrorist and a murderer.

[A] Neeson: But he actually worked for peace. When the treaty was ratified by the people of Ireland, he fought tooth and nail for peace. Of course, then the civil war started. He had to race all over the country meeting groups of men to try to stop the spread of war, because that was the time to build. That's what I love about him, and that's what I feel really comes across in the film. His detractors think he was an out-and-out terrorist, a thug, a brutal murderer. I don't believe that. He fought a war that he felt had to be fought, on principle, and once it was over he wanted to get on with the economy of the country.

[Q] Playboy: Here we are, 74 years later, and again there's violence and terrorism involving the IRA.

[A] Neeson: I'm very upset that that kind of mayhem has broken out again.

[Q] Playboy: Is the situation hopeless?

[A] Neeson: No. For two years, the people of Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, tasted a kind of freedom and peace, and they will not allow it to go back to what it was.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been threatened because of your visibility?

[A] Neeson: I've had journalistic threats written in a very weird way because publicity I had done for Schindler's List was taken out of context. Someone asked me a question about Gerry Adams, and I said something to the effect that at least he's breaking the stalemate, something is being done, you know.

[Q] Playboy: This was on his first trip to America?

[A] Neeson: Yes. Of course, this was picked up in Europe, and the Belfast Telegraph, which is our local newspaper, printed something that made me sound like a big supporter of Adams. And a journalist said something like, "Mr. Neeson must now be scared for his life, for if Protestant paramilitaries read this or hear about this, he will be a legitimate target."

[Q] Playboy: What did you do?

[A] Neeson: I faxed a letter to the lord mayor in Ballymena saying how proud I was to be from there, that I went to schools with Protestants and Catholics and had a really good upbringing. My letter was published in various newspapers in Northern Ireland.

[Q] Playboy: Does that make you reluctant to talk in public?

[A] Neeson: No. That doesn't mean I refuse to talk about Anglo-Irish politics. I will obviously be getting into that one way or another.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see a solution?

[A] Neeson: The trouble with both Protestants and Catholics is that we always look to the past instead of to the future. Protestants and Catholics have so much in common in Northern Ireland. Unemployment, for one thing. Housing, for another. In Ireland, politics is like the weather. It's talked about daily. Maybe that's the trouble--it's talked about too bloody much.

[Q] Playboy: You grew up in fairly modest circumstances.

[A] Neeson: We were very working-class. I don't want to say we were poor, but there were certainly years when money to pay bills was a huge issue. That's not putting my mom and father down; that's just the way it was. But we had brilliant schooling. That's the other thing Northern Ireland is famous for--a fantastic level of education and literacy, which is actually the highest in the British Isles.

[Q] Playboy: How do you account for that?

[A] Neeson: In Ireland, education has always been of prime importance. For many years, Catholics were deprived of any kind of schooling. From those roots grew a passion to get an education because it was a ticket to a better life. And when the trouble was at its fiercest in the early Seventies, you didn't dare go out in the streets. All you did was stay in and do your homework.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of student were you?

[A] Neeson: I had one aborted year at Queen's University in Belfast. Before college, I had always been a model student. I respected my teachers. I always worked to get my homework done. But that was over when I went to university. There, nobody gives a damn if you go to your lectures or do your homework. And I just went to pieces. I didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't date girls. I just sat in my room or went to physics lectures. My whole system just shut down. I wasn't ill. One of my sisters was there at the same time, and I used to go to her apartment. She only recently admitted that when she'd look out the window and see it was me at the door, she'd pretend she wasn't there. Because I would come in and just sit and not contribute anything.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds like you missed the structure you had in your earlier days.

[A] Neeson: Yeah, that's true. That same year, something happened that affected the bowels of my soul. I went to a physics lecture, and in my catatonic state didn't notice that there were hardly any students about. The lecturer was very subdued, and there were maybe three other students in a class that normally had 20 or 30. I walked home after the lecture and was suddenly surrounded by a hundred students with placards, shouting, "Scab, scab, scab!" It was absolutely terrifying. I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn't know what the fuck I'd done. It turned out there were 13 people murdered in Derry the day before by British paratroopers. A wave of shock had gone through Northern Ireland, but not me.

[Q] Playboy: You may not have been much of a student, but you were quite a boxer, weren't you?

[A] Neeson: I was amateur, of course. I started when I was nine, though I couldn't enter competition until I was 11. I was a good classical boxer. I loved the science of the sport. I had a really good left jab, but I wasn't a crowd-pleaser because I hated to mix it up with the other guy. I'd sooner do the right thing according to the science of it.

[Q] Playboy: How well did you do?

[A] Neeson: I was Northern Ireland champion for three years, and I was a diocese champion for six years. I loved the training, I loved the paraphernalia of the sport. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it gave me a lot of respect for virtues such as dedication and discipline and respecting your fellowman.

[Q] Playboy: After Lennox Lewis won an unpopular decision over Ray Mercer this past May, you were quoted as saying that Lewis was trying to follow too much of an American style of boxing. What did you mean?

[A] Neeson: Boxing judges in America tend to give fights to boxers who are aggressive. In Europe, they tend to reward really good defense work and footwork; you know, if somebody throws a killer punch and the other guy blocks it in a classic way. That gets points. In this country it doesn't: The guy who throws the punch, even though it may land with the inside of the glove, gets extra points because he's more aggressive. In that Lewis-Mercer fight I got hoarse from shouting "Stick and move! Stick and move!"

[Q] Playboy: Stick and move?

[A] Neeson: Stick with the left and move out of trouble. Just keep doing that. Because the other guy had shoulders like a brick shithouse and was a very good fighter. But Lewis always wanted to go in and prove to the audience, as a lot of boxers do, that "I can take this and I can give it as well." That's usually how they get beat. Take Ali and Frazier--Ali is a classic example of someone who should have stuck and moved.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Mike Tyson?

[A] Neeson: I've seen him live three times. I saw the first Frank Bruno fight and a couple others that I can't even remember, they were over so fast. I think he's a wonderful heavyweight. I've never seen a fighter come into the ring who scares you like he does. But he's going through something in his own life, and he's growing up.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Neeson: Well, at the age of 14, which wasn't that many years ago, this guy apparently was mugging people. But I see a real sweetness and goodness in the guy, too. I hope it doesn't get hammered out of him, and I don't mean by an opponent. He's lethal in the ring, and it will be exciting when he eventually goes against one of the classic heavyweights out there. There aren't that many of them, but I sense a showdown in the air.

[Q] Playboy: Was there a showdown that ended your boxing career?

[A] Neeson: I must have been 15, and it was in Ballymena. I think the competition was Northern Ireland Boys Clubs, and if you won you went on to the British Boys Clubs Federation. It was a big championship, and I was fighting a guy whose last name was Liggett. I remember there were three tough rounds. I lost the fight. I actually thought I won, but I lost the fight, and when I came out of the ring I didn't know who I was or where I was. I hadn't been knocked out, I was functioning. But my father came over to me and said, "Go to the dressing room and get changed," and I didn't know what that meant--"dressing room," "get changed." I must have looked catatonic. I started moving toward a doorway, then had to go downstairs. Everything gradually came back as I negotiated those stairs, holding on to the banister. It lasted maybe three minutes, but I got really scared. It's not as if I'd taken a hammering, but I thought, Well, that's fucking it.

[Q] Playboy: You're essentially a working-class guy who married into an acting aristocracy, almost a royal family of the theater. Do you ever marvel at this turn of events?

[A] Neeson: I don't, because aristocracy is a term my wife and I hate.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Neeson: When you use words like that you think of tea on silver served on the croquet lawn at 2:30. We jokingly talk about us royals. It provides a good laugh. Natasha and her sister, Joely, had a tough upbringing, with Vanessa filming somewhere and their father making a film somewhere else.

[Q] Playboy: Jodie Foster said of Natasha and you, "She's a cosmopolitan, socialized cynic like me, a brain. He lives in the messy world of instinct."

[A] Neeson: Oh, yeah, "He doesn't have the stuff of words," or something.

[Q] Playboy: True?

[A] Neeson: It sounds very Jodie, but it's not true.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Neeson: Well, to say that Natasha lives in her brain couldn't be further from the truth. She's the most sensual woman, in touch with everything that's real. That actually may be a description of Jodie, to tell the truth.

[Q] Playboy: Do you and Natasha work differently? Do you have different styles?

[A] Neeson: No, I think we're very similar in our way of working. But she's much more meticulous than I am. She is always her own harshest critic. She would say, "I didn't get that moment." Or she would say, "You know, that moment is starting to get a bit flabby between us." She's a great one for keeping an eye on that. She'll probably be a very good director.

[Q] Playboy: How are you both as actors?

[A] Neeson: I think Natasha is more fearless than I am, actually.

[Q] Playboy: Is that the heritage?

[A] Neeson: I think so. It's also part of her psychological makeup. Even when I was acting with her in the O'Neill play on Broadway, she would experiment with little moments, she would always push the envelope. And I admire that.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you do the same?

[A] Neeson: Not so much as she does. If a moment is working for me, I want to kind of leave it alone. She will want to investigate it.

[Q] Playboy: Is she more cynical?

[A] Neeson: I'm certainly a much bigger cynic than Natasha is. I mean, if we're bantering with each other, she'll say, "You'll always see a dark cloud in the silver lining, whereas I try to see the silver lining." And then I'll go into a really thick Irish accent and say, "I can't be bothered going out today because something bad will happen." If something good happens, I'll say, "I wonder why that happened?" Or, "Why is this person praising me? What's behind it?"

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that after all these years you're still uneasy with praise?

[A] Neeson: Oh, yeah. I think one should be. I think praise fucks up lots of people. There should be a law--every would-be actor and every writer and director should go through theater training, real theater. And act in the classics--Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen--just to learn the craft. It should be at its best a democracy. Being a star, being selfish, living in a cocooned world--that doesn't lead to growth. That just leads to death.

[Q] Playboy: Offscreen, you tend to be accessible, and casual almost to the point of grunge.

[A] Neeson: I like to think I am. Obviously, if we go to events, I enjoy dressing up. These extraordinary designers throw clothes at you, which always makes me terribly embarrassed.

[Q] Playboy: Do you know that some designers pay stars to wear their clothes to big events?

[A] Neeson: No, get away.

[Q] Playboy: No one has ever offered you a wardrobe?

[A] Neeson: Oh, Mr. Armani has. I have two tuxedos that he made for me, and if I were doing a press junket, for example, my publicist might call him up and say, 'Look, Liam is doing this in Europe.' Suddenly there's an invitation to go over to the New York showroom and get decked out with a couple of shirts or a jacket, something like that.

[Q] Playboy: An offer you can't refuse?

[A] Neeson: He's an extraordinary artist, and it's an honor to wear his stuff. Armani is the maestro. I went to one of his shows for men in Milan and it was extraordinary. I knew nothing about the fashion world, so it was something to be sitting there with my wife, with Eric Clapton beside us, looking at the fabric and how it falls on a particular jacket and sharing our thoughts. Armani invited us back to his house and there were all these interesting people. We went to his showroom in Milan the next morning--I felt quite embarrassed by that, so I left with maybe three ties and a pair of socks or something. I could never bring myself to point to all these great jackets and suits and say, "I want that, that and that." I just couldn't do it.

[Q] Playboy: So you're shy about picking clothes. How about picking scripts?

[A] Neeson: I'm beginning to get more tough-minded. I love reading scripts, the bad along with the good. But now if I'm on the fence about something, I'll ask Natasha to read it, and she'll say, "Well, this is good for that reason, or it's bad for that reason."

To which I'll respond, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. That's true. That's why the second act doesn't work."

[Q] Playboy: Is she more analytical than you are?

[A] Neeson: Well, she's another voice and she's very intelligent, very good at homing in to see exactly what's wrong with something. I'll flirt around it for a while and get discombobulated.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Neeson: Because I don't think I have that sort of accuracy--we're talking about scripts now--as to why something's not working. I have to get up and rehearse it. I've been in situations where people are all sitting around with pens and paper going through the script, and an actor will say, "This line doesn't work for me." And I ask, "Why not?"

"Because I don't think he would say that."

I say, "Well, fuck it, at least get up and act the scene and see if it works."

[Q] Playboy: You at least try to make it work.

[A] Neeson: I try to make it work because that's my fucking job. Then if it doesn't work, we'll change it. That's the world I come from.

[Q] Playboy: What do you enjoy in movies?

[A] Neeson: What I love in films is a sense of real joy, like the recent Jon Avnet film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Red-ford, Up Close and Personal. Did you see that? I loved it. It was like a throwback to Frank Capra's films. There was a chemistry that came across between them, and I loved it for that.

[Q] Playboy: You're a pushover.

[A] Neeson: That time I was. I surprised myself. I thought, here are two stars at their peak and they're really sharing with each other. You can sense that they like each other.

[Q] Playboy: You say that every actor should be schooled in the classics, but you praise a big-budget formula picture. Do you really like mindless movies?

[A] Neeson: That is what those kind of movies are--that Friday-night, buy-the-popcorn, sit-in-a-big-movie-theater movie where you just watch two wonderful stars. OK, you can take the script and say, "Where's the reality in this?" but for some films you have to push that aside and just enjoy them.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about movie stars. Do you see yourself as everybody else does, as solidly in the company of stars?

[A] Neeson: Sometimes. I'm lucky to be doing this. Let's face it, the rewards are great, and it's a gamble to start with. It could easily not have been like this.

[Q] Playboy: You and your family live in New York, where you seem happy. Someone said about you recently, "Oh, Liam is gloomy about living in Los Angeles and loves to talk about how he hates it. But he dances the dance just like everybody else." Is that true?

[A] Neeson: Sure. Yeah. But on the outside you can be seen to dance the dance--whatever that means. The expression, to me, means someone snaps his fingers and you dance. I certainly never did that.

[Q] Playboy: "Dancing the dance" doesn't mean that you're at somebody's beck and call. We took the comment to mean that you understand there are certain moves you have to make in a career and you make them.

[A] Neeson: There are times I've had to do that and did. Like taking meetings with a director or a casting agent that I felt in my heart I shouldn't take because it didn't feel right, or the piece of material, even though I may have been interested in it before, was a pile of dross. In that way I've danced the dance. And inevitably you learn something at those meetings. You have to put on an act because you're feeling, God, this is awful, but you have a huge bill to pay next month.

So a lot of that shit goes on. Everybody does it. Then you end up not getting the part. "Fuck 'em! That's definitely the last time I dance." And then, of course, you do again, because that's the nature of the beast.

[Q] Playboy: What about playing the promotion game, dealing with the media?

[A] Neeson: There's an incredible rudeness in the press, especially by photographers, that to my mind doesn't marry with this country. I love America, and I'm proud to have the chance to work here. And generally speaking, I see the country as very open, very gracious. Having lived in London, I can condemn the English press in other ways, but I never witnessed that kind of intrusion there. Alec Baldwin smacked some photographer here a while ago, and quite rightly, too. I would have followed up with a right hook. And not just one.

[Q] Playboy: Have you read the unauthorized biography of you?

[A] Neeson: I have. I had a lawyer note a couple things in it, too. It hurt because the author, Ingrid Millar, and I had a very good interview in Dublin two and a half years ago for an English magazine, I can't remember which. And then, unbeknownst to me, she went off and claimed in the foreword of the English version of the bloody book that she had talked with my family. She wrote acknowledgments to my sisters and to schoolteachers who never said boo to her.

[Q] Playboy: So all of this is false?

[A] Neeson: Honest to God--and I remember that interview with her, which I genuinely enjoyed. I felt it was such a smack in the face. I'm not saying she went out to knife me. She says a lot of stuff that's nice, but it's guff, you know? It sold one and a half copies, I think. Thanks be to God. But now a fan might stop me with the book and ask me to sign it, and that's the only thing I won't sign. Because that makes it sort of legitimate in a weird way. And it's an embarrassment to my mom. My mom's photograph is in the bloody thing.

[Q] Playboy: Let's go back to those dark clouds you see in silver linings. You connected them with cynicism earlier, but is there melancholy at work there as well?

[A] Neeson: Oh yeah, I think so, sure.

[Q] Playboy: I mean, people say glibly that it's the Irish nature, but--

[A] Neeson: I certainly think it's in the Irish temperament, but as melancholic as I can be, I can turn on a sixpence and be absolutely ecstatic, you know? Which is a very Irish thing. I see it in my countrymen all the time. But yeah, I tend to gloat over bad things with a lot more ease than over the good things. Some critics have described my performances as soulful. I can see that.

[Q] Playboy: Has fatherhood changed that?

[A] Neeson: Well my son is one year old, he's still very young. He's changing, I'm changing, too. Certainly there is, if I were to dwell on it, a fear of the future. But I think fathers of every generation have felt that. I know my father did, watching the Rolling Stones on television. Guys with long hair. I could sense in his quietness, "What is the world coming to? And what will my son and three daughters grow up into if this is the image of youth?"

[Q] Playboy: Was he right?

[A] Neeson: He was right! What is the world coming to? And now the Rolling Stones are the elder statesmen of the rock-and-roll world. But I think every generation feels it. And I'm enjoying that in a warped kind of way. Enjoying those feelings for the first time and thinking, God, every parent in every country on this planet has felt exactly what I'm feeling now. Today I discovered an abrasion on my son's leg. It was just from dryness, from pulling himself across the carpet, but it was a major thing. Five o'clock this morning I was up with him and I saw that and my heart just started pumping. It was like, there's something wrong here. Just a tiny little rashy thing. And then when you quiet down and have a cup of tea, you think, Well, welcome to the club, Liam. You know, I'll always remember something Gabriel Byrne told me when I saw him and his little son, Jack, about four years ago. I was visiting them in the Hollywood Hills and I looked at this beautiful, longhaired, naked little boy running around at his father's knees. I've known Gabriel for many years, and I said, "God, Gabriel, what does that feel like?"

He said, "I'll tell you, when he was born I realized my place in the universe." And that's absolutely right. When Micheal was born it was just perfect, the jigsaw kind of came together. And then you start thinking, This is obviously how my father felt. And so the world turns.

[Q] Playboy: You said something several years ago that also had to do with recognizing your place in the grand scheme of things. It was when you were starring in Anna Christie on Broadway with Natasha. You were talking with Francis X. Clines, from The New York Times, and you used a wonderful phrase. You talked about acting as an "ancient craft of rogues and vagabond make-believers."

[A] Neeson: It's true. I'm proud of the fact that we come from rogues and vagabonds who were shunned from time to time. They would set up their little stage on the back of a cart and act plays. That in turn came from shamans--you still get this in cultures throughout the world--who were go-betweens for a tribe and God, or the ether, or whatever it is up there. The shaman would paint his face and dance around a fire, and it became a performance. But more than a performance, it was, I think, where actors come from--the storytellers and the go-betweens who explain to an audience something of the mystery of life. And that's the power of theater. Especially when you see the work of one of the master playwrights--Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov--and you get a sense of the religious. That's the purest form of it. I'm from that tradition--rogues and vagabonds who got kicked out of towns because society couldn't pin them down. They were mercurial, they played different characters, they wore different guises. And therefore they were always to be feared. They still are, I think.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about your work on the stage. After you did Anna Christie with Rip Torn and the actress who is now your wife, you expressed a concern that in the early days of the run you were too theatrical.

[A] Neeson: Whereas on camera I tend to think of myself as being almost too subtle.

[Q] Playboy: Was it overcompensation, then?

[A] Neeson: Well, before Anna Christie, I felt I was festering in Hollywood. I'd done this film Leap of Faith--

[Q] Playboy: With Steve Martin.

[A] Neeson: Yes, but leaving aside Steve, who's a friend, for me, doing that picture was soul-destroying. And I'll not go into details as to why. I just went through feeling so cheap and so dirty, being part of something that had the potential to be good but wasn't going to be. Realizing all that very early on and not connecting with certain people in the cast made me so fucking depressed. After that--I made sure the money was in the bank--I thought, I really have to get out of this town.

And then Natasha, who'd been in touch with me a couple times before that, said, "Look, we have a venue for doing Anna Christie." It was in that wonderful dark period in New York, coming up to Christmastime, and without a moment's hesitation, something in me said, "You have to do it." I was vaguely familiar with the play. I love O'Neill's work, and when I picked this up and read it, I cried because I knew I could just fucking go. Just breathe into it and barnstorm it and know what was right. I knew exactly how to be that character.

[Q] Playboy: So Natasha had already been in touch with you to work together?

[A] Neeson: To do this play, yeah.

[Q] Playboy:Leap of Faith must have been quite a bitter disappointment for you because people were talking about it being a big hit.

[A] Neeson: I think everybody talks about every film that's going to be made as a huge hit. That's one of the things I actually like about the film business--there's this eternal hope. And, certainly, of the scripts I'd read I thought it was very good. But it's that thing we were talking about before. Sometimes the chemistry doesn't work, even though the individual components are very good.

[Q] Playboy: Someone once joked that the world is divided into people who like Braveheart and those who like Rob Roy. Two very different kinds of movies.

[A] Neeson: With 400 years separating them.

[Q] Playboy: Yet they get lumped together in some people's minds.

[A] Neeson: Because Mel and I both wear skirts in them.

[Q] Playboy: You both used the same Scottish locations in the highlands around Fort William, right?

[A] Neeson: That's right. We arrived there about two years ago. Mel and his gang had been there just days before us, and we heard these awful stories that they had been rained on for five solid weeks. I had read Braveheart and thought the two stories couldn't be further apart. But the crew would always report some snippet of gossip they'd heard about money being spent and stuff.

[Q] Playboy: Gibson's people spent lots of money?

[A] Neeson: They had $60 million to spend and we had $23 million. But the locals at Fort William pumped up the prices because Gibson and Co. had been in before. I paid Central Park West prices to stay in a tiny house. It still galls me when I think about it. I was hoping the landlord would come around on the last day and ask for my autograph, because I was going to put him up against the wall and say, "Remember this, you cunt." It just galls me when I get taken like that. That was the legacy of Braveheart that immediately affected me.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the movie you're most famous for, Schindler's List. I've read different stories about how and when Steven Spielberg offered you the part. The one I've heard most is that he was backstage after seeing you in Anna Christie, and what swung it was that you hugged his mother-in-law--Kate Capshaw's mother--in a way he thought Oskar Schindler would have.

[A] Neeson: I've read different stories, too, and they're so great I don't want to tamper with them. But the essence is true. I did a screen test for him. I worked on it for two weeks and rented a costume and did all that stuff.

[Q] Playboy: A period costume?

[A] Neeson: A period costume, yes. The great thing was that it was just Steven and me and a video camera at Universal. I always believe if there's something I really like, it's important to tell the director, "I want to do this." Just to cut through the bullshit. I certainly told Steven that. But after it was over I thought, You know something? If I don't get this, I've had the most wonderful half-day's work with one of the great film directors. Just the two of us working through a piece of text. And then I didn't hear from him, but I was so into Anna Christie--I was ecstatic doing this play and it became a success. Then Steven and Kate and his mother-in-law came to see it. Backstage, afterward, they were very gracious and I was determined not to say anything about Schindler's List.

[Q] Playboy: Did you?

[A] Neeson: No, I didn't. And I remember so well his mother-in-law coming to our dressing room after the play. There was the residue of tears, let's put it that way, on her cheeks. She was very moved by the play, so I went over and gave her a big hug. And apparently afterward Kate said, "That's just what Schindler would have done." So Steven called me a few days later and said, "The part's yours." And he then said, "You know, I enjoyed you in that play, especially when you wore the suit." There was one scene where I was all cleaned up, and he had been thinking, What would he look like as Schindler?

[Q] Playboy: He didn't want a hairy ape.

[A] Neeson: Right. But he said, "You know, I kept going back to the screen test, and that's what swung it." That's the truth, and it kind of debunks some of these stories. I mean, I did hug Kate's mom, and if something came out of that, then great. Anyway, I finished the play on a Sunday, and on Tuesday at 5 A.M. I was at the gates of Auschwitz, dressed as Oskar Schindler. And I still feel guilty because on the flight over I read What's It All About, Michael Caine's autobiography. I felt like a peevish schoolboy. As I was flying into Europe I thought, I must pick up this script, I have a huge scene tomorrow. But I couldn't put down the autobiography.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe it was just that picking up the script and plunging into the emotional depths was forbidding.

[A] Neeson: I know, keep it pushed back--it's true. And particularly Schindler's List, because of course there is any amount of research one can do on the guy and the period and all the rest of it. I saw tapes of the real Oskar Schindler, and I had stacks of books and stuff on that whole Nazi period. But I thought, It's almost pointless reading this, because I'm going to have an attitude. The thing is, back in that period nobody knew what the hell was happening. Rules were being invented every second. You didn't know where to stand, what to say. It's best to keep that ignorance, so I resisted as much as possible reading about the period. Now I'm reading about the Holocaust. I'm still going into bookshops and looking for survivor stories and stuff.

[Q] Playboy: You said darkly to somebody in an interview, "Schindler isn't going to turn me into Kevin Costner."

[A] Neeson: Did I say that?

[Q] Playboy: It's said you said it. And it makes sense that you'd worry about it. Everybody in the business wants to have as much freedom to operate as they can get. Costner's and Tom Cruise's success gives them that freedom. Is that what you want?

[A] Neeson: The thing about Kevin and Tom is, they have these production entities. They're very clever. And they're also astute businessmen.

[Q] Playboy: You don't have any ambitions in that direction?

[A] Neeson: Not really, no.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever yearn for the bygone days of the studio system?

[A] Neeson: There's a lovely thing Richard Harris said about the studios and how they've changed. He said, "When I was out there"--in the early Sixties, I think it was--"if I picked up the phone on Monday and asked for somebody in charge, if his name was John, I spoke to John. If I was told to call back on Friday, I called back on Friday and I could still speak to John. Nowadays, you speak to John on Monday, and by the time you get to Friday you're speaking to Frank. John is not there anymore. Nobody knows who he is."

[Q] Playboy: Would you have wanted to make movies during the days of the studio system?

[A] Neeson: It would have been wonderful to be part of that, clock in every day at six like an honest tradesman. Then someone would say to you, "Today you're Lord Ponseroy and you're defending the castle." And four weeks later you would put on a gun belt and go to Dodge City. But God, it must have been exhausting.

[Q] Playboy: What about the endless publicity that stars did on command?

[A] Neeson: But at the same time the studios protected you. If you got into any trouble, they were there for you.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about an upcoming Oscar in your life, Oscar Wilde. He is obviously a departure from Michael Collins.

[A] Neeson: Yes, but he's Irish.

[Q] Playboy: Here we have a conspicuously heterosexual actor playing one of the most astounding homosexuals in the history of literature. But it does present a few challenges.

[A] Neeson: Sure. Oscar Wilde was always kind of a hero of mine. I've never acted in any of his plays, though I've enjoyed reading them. I mean, we all know stories of Wilde's wit and the things he's (concluded on page 157)Liam Neeson(continued from page 60) supposed to have said. Richard Ell-mann's book, Oscar Wilde, is a wonderful, definitive biography, and it reads like a great novel. That kind of confirmed in me just how special this man was. And how heroic he was to pontificate about the importance of art.

[Q] Playboy: He was a believer.

[A] Neeson: He would have died for this belief. Some people said perhaps he should have died, but he went to Reading Gaol in this unbelievable servitude for two years. He suffered the horrors of being both a homosexual in jail and being a writer who in the early days was denied writing materials--he had to sew bags together to write. Hardened criminals took their hats off to Wilde That appeals to me And this all-encompassing love that he had for this asshole of a character, Lord Douglas, the Marquess of Queensbury's son. A total dickhead, you know who used Oscar while everybody said, "You don't see what this cunt is doing?" But he stood by him and he loved him passionately.

[Q] Playboy: Blindly.

[A] Neeson: Yeah, he couldn't stop himself. He recognized the well of love he had for this person and knew instinctively how he would have felt if he had followed his friends' advice and skipped the country and never seen him again. He would have suffered a worse fate, he felt. It's going to be interesting to get that love in the script, to enable an audience to see that love. They've seen guys thrashing around on a bed, I certainly don't want to do that. But to show the nature of that love and to show something about the man Oscar fell in love with, instead of seeing total asshole. That's going to be the hard thing to do, because the audience is going to say, "Well, why does he love him? The guy's a jerk."

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you physically too big for the part?

[A] Neeson: No. Everybody thinks Wilde was this effete Englishman. He was a lumbering, ungainly six-foot-three Irish-man. He was very strong and could box and fight and punch out people who insulted him. There's a wonderful description in Ellmann's book about how he walked. He had this ape-like gait, but then when he would get onstage he'd pull himself up and show his other side. He traveled all over America, went to little one-horse towns to give lectures on art to the miners. Stood on barroom tables. It's staggering.

[Q] Playboy: You work almost constantly. What do you do to relax?

[A] Neeson: I'm a fly fisherman. I have developed a passion for it.

[Q] Playboy: What about it appeals to you?

[A] Neeson: Yeah, I can see how this will sound, "Liam Neeson talks about his flies. Liam Neeson talks about his big rod." I must get this issue.

[Q] Playboy: You said it, we didn't. How did this hobby start?

[A] Neeson: I was doing Nell with Natasha and Jodie Foster a couple of years ago in South Carolina, and we were filming on this beautiful lake. Between setups the props lady, a very sweet lady who had done the props for A River Runs Through It, started giving me instructions on fly-fishing, and I just found myself getting more and more hooked on it. No pun intended. When we wrapped, Jodie very kindly bought me this beautiful Orvis rod, some gear to go with it and a wonderful instruction book. That had me off and running.

[Q] Playboy: What's your favorite part of it?

[A] Neeson: I love the serenity. I love the absolute focus of it. It's not relaxing-- you're trying to land a man-made fly delicately on the surface of some water in order to fool a fish. Each time I go out it's a new set of problems to be solved. OK, this is the water. I think there are trout over there beneath that crop of bushes. The sun is shining. Do I use a dull little fly? Do I use a wet fly that goes underneath the surface, or do I use a dry fly that's just going to sit on top and float down to where a fish may be? It's like golf, because one day you go out and have a great game, and the next day you go out and feel like throwing your gear in the closet.

[Q] Playboy: Some people like fly-fishing because it incorporates solitude and a time for contemplation. But you're depicting something much more active than that.

[A] Neeson: Well, it is. It's you and a stretch of river. You become one with the water and the land and the sky and the trees. That's kind of a hippie way of saying it, but it's true. And that rod becomes another appendage. I've seen some brilliant fly fishermen, and the rod's just an extension of their bodies. It's like seeing a wonderful painter whose brush is an extension of his mind. Also, when you're on a river or a lake and there are other fishermen around, you don't think, Oh, there's John Doe, he's a banker, or, There's Liam Neeson, the actor. You just think, There's another fisherman. I wonder what he's using. You can have some great conversations that way.

[Q] Playboy: Is that important to you?

[A] Neeson: I'm not trying to put myself on any pedestal, I promise you. But since I was a kid I've always wanted to be able to see both sides. That's why I could never be a really good boxer. I don't have that killer instinct. That's just the way I am, you know?

I'm proud of the fact that actors come from rogues and vagabonds who were shunned from time to time.

Being a star, being selfish, living in a cocooned world--that doesn't lead to growth. That just leads to death.

I finished the play on a Sunday, and on Tuesday I was at the gates of Auschwitz, dressed as Oskar Schindler.