In 2015, Liam Neeson, the star of the Taken films, predicted he probably had “maybe two more years” of action films in him. In 2017, the actor implied that his action movie days might be behind him, only to immediately retract that statement and promise that he would “be doing action movies until they bury me in the ground.” Earlier this year, he seemed to change his mind once again, saying he had a couple more action films “in the pipeline and then I think that will probably be it.”
But as the man continues to age, new Liam Neeson action movies just keep coming out. In a new interview, Neeson appears to be as surprised as anyone at the longevity of this particular phase of his acting career. “I’m 69! I just turned 69 years of age,” he says, seemingly incredulous that filmmakers keep approaching him to play the lead in movies in which he fights people on or around various modes of transportation.
“I’m 69!” he told Entertainment Weekly, expressing the same level of shock that some folks probably have when they see Neeson’s grizzled visage in a new action movie trailer. He continued:
“I just turned 69 years of age, and the conversations I have with my agent now are, ‘Liam, have you read this script? It’s an action script,’ and I say, ‘Chris, let me ask you this, they do know what age I am, right?’ ‘Yes, they do.’ ‘Okay, that’s all I want to know, thank you.’ That being said, I keep reasonably fit, and you just have to for some of these films. If you’re playing the lead in any film, you have the responsibility; you’re in practically every scene, it behooves you to be fit. You don’t have to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the age of 35, but you have to have stamina. So I do my little workouts every day and keep reasonably fit.”
The Ice Road Won’t Be The Last Time You See Him in Action Mode
Neeson soon stars in The Ice Road, a new Netflix thriller in which he plays an ice road trucker who has to save a group of miners by driving over icy environments. When EW asked if he was trying to get as much action in while he still feels like he can, Neeson responded, “I guess, and I just did one in Australia with Mark Williams, who did Honest Thief. It’s an action film called Blacklight, we finished it before Christmas.” He then plays a hitman who is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s in a movie called Memory, and following that up with Retribution, which is sort of a riff on Speed.
“I’m going over to Berlin next Monday to start a film where my fat Irish ass sits in a Mercedes or BMW for 98 percent of the film, with my two kids in the back,” Neeson says of Retribution. “I’ve been told it’s a bomb-pressurized seat, because I’m in the financial markets and I’ve lost a customer a lot of money and he’s taking his revenge.”
Sounds like he wasn’t joking about continuing to make action movies until he’s dead and buried, and let’s hope that’s still many years away.
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