7 questions about Liam Neeson saying he wanted to “kill” a “black bastard” after a friend’s assault
Just in case you haven’t yet read The Independent’s new interview with Liam Neeson, here’s the gist: During a routine junket interview for his new movie Cold Pursuit, Neeson inexplicably decided to drop a jaw-dropping story about how, in some indeterminate point in the past, an unnamed woman he knew was sexually assaulted, and, well, we’ll just excerpt at length:
“But my immediate reaction was…” There’s a pause. “I asked, did she know who it was? No. What colour were they? She said it was a black person.
“I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody – I’m ashamed to say that – and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson gestures air quotes with his fingers] ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could,” another pause, “kill him.”
Neeson clearly knows what he’s saying, and how shocking it is, how appalling. “It took me a week, maybe a week and a half, to go through that. She would say, ‘Where are you going?’ and I would say, ‘I’m just going out for a walk.’ You know? ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘No no, nothing’s wrong.’”
He deliberately withholds details to protect the identity of the victim. “It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that,” he says. “And I’ve never admitted that, and I’m saying it to a journalist. God forbid.”
“Holy shit,” says Tom Bateman, his co-star, who is sitting beside him.
“It’s awful,” Neeson continues, a tremble in his breath. “But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing,’ you know?”
Keep in mind that junket interviews are generally not one-on-one, so this was most likely witnessed by a whole room full of people sitting around a conference-room table with tape recorders and notepads, expecting to sleepwalk through a series of questions about if it was fun/difficult to drive a snowplow, what it was like to work with Laura Dern, and so on. Then, this. On top of that, junket interviews are generally quite short—in the article, The Independent writer Clémence Michallon says it was 17 minutes in length—so there was no real chance to ask follow-up questions.
And so, aside from stating that we are all Tom Bateman in this moment, we’d like to ask a few of those follow-up questions now.