He'll talk about his new film, being Irish in LA, and the theatre. He won't discuss Northern Ireland or his family life. And he'll groan when you ask him about the time he 'retired' from acting. As Donald Clarke discovers, Liam Neeson has learnt to keep his mouth shut
Liam Neeson, OBE, has a singular way of refusing to answer a question. Like a sated gourmand declining a fifth éclair, he raises his hand, shakes his head and exhales a pained sigh. Having put his foot in it once too often in the past, the 50-year-old actor is now inclined toward a great deal of head-shaking and sighing.
"But then, sometimes you're cursed if you do speak and cursed if you don't," he says in his sleepy Northern drawl.
Flicking through his cuttings, you see what he means. Indeed, if you believed all you read, you'd be surprised to find Neeson still in the business at all. Two years ago he was reported to have announced his retirement from movie acting to a US journalist. Yet here he sits in a Mayfair hotel, promoting his role in Kathryn Bigelow's new submarine adventure, K-19: The Widowmaker. What gives?
He groans and casts his eyes to heaven: "Oh God, that's all water under the bridge. I mean, it was all my own fault. I'd just done two pictures back to back. I was so missing my wife and kids. It was one of these chirpy little journalists." He adopts an annoying American accent. "'So, Liam, what's next?' Something about the timbre of her voice got to me. So I just said, 'Well, I'm giving up this business for a start'."
So it was a classic throwaway Irish quip?
"Yeah. Well, this lady didn't get it. I said it off the cuff. I didn't mean it. But before long, my agent was getting calls. And he was phoning me up: am I giving up the business? But it really was all my own fault."
Neeson shakes his head and settles back into the benign torpor that will characterise our meeting. It is nearly a quarter of a century since he left Belfast's Lyric Theatre for Dublin, and 20 years since John Boorman plucked him from the Abbey to cast him in Excalibur, yet that characteristic Northern Irish caution and reserve is still in evidence.
His relationship with his homeland has been an uneasy one of late. He recently refused the freedom of the borough of Ballymena after a number of DUP councillors objected to comments he had made about the difficulties he encountered growing up as a Catholic in a largely Protestant town. Before I get to the end of the sentence, he is already in éclairdeclining mode.
"I don't want to to talk about it," he says looking positively pained. "If I open my mouth about any of that shit, it just gets me in trouble."
I could be wrong, but I sense that he is chomping at the bit to get stuck in. But after many years, he has finally trained himself to behave. That may explain why he approaches interviews with such scant enthusiasm. He adopts the same tortured silence when I ask him to tell us about the experience of marrying into the Redgrave clan. (His wife, Natasha Richardson, is the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the late film director Tony Richardson.)
"I've decided to just leave that stuff alone," he says. "In the past 10 to 12 years, journalists have tended to splice one sentence together with another for effect, and that used to bug the shit out of me. Especially in respect to me coming from the North of Ireland: it was often done with a certain malevolence - hoping to create a tension - and that makes me very angry."
In truth, he sounds more sad than angry. Given all this aggro, it is perhaps no surprise that he has not joined the hoards of thespians queuing up to buy castles in Wicklow. He now lives in upstate New York with Richardson and their two children. This proved convenient for his recent Tony-nominated appearance in Richard Eyre's Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. I wonder why established film actors feel the need to need to expose themselves to the danger that comes with stage work.
"Well, you are in charge from 7.30 to 10.30 each night," he says. "I did love that. In fact, now that I'm finished it, I'm getting withdrawal symptoms. But, unlike in cinema, the actor drives the thing. Film is more a director's medium. Between action and cut is wonderful, but then you're sent off to sit in your trailer, and that can be frustrating. Being in The Crucible, I felt in touch with an art form that's older than cinema by 5,000 years."
Is he in the US to stay, then?
"I just love New York," he says. "In fact, I now feel like a New Yorker. I'm married there. I'm rearing two kids. That's definitely where my home is. Several years ago, I'd have said that I was an Irishman living in New York, but now I'm a New Yorker. I felt that particularly doing The Crucible after September 11th, when I saw the audiences still coming to see it. There was a lot of fear, and the tourist industry had really dropped off. But we had packed audiences every night. I felt great pride in that."
Unlike other immigrants to the US, such as, say, Mel Gibson, Neeson has not devoted his time to playing Americans. He plays Germans (Schindler's List), Russians (K-19: The Widowmaker), extra-terrestrials (The Phantom Menace) and even - Michael Collins springs to mind - the occasional Irishman.
"I like to think that I'm still viewed as an international actor: an actor who comes from Ireland rather than an Irish actor - to me there's a difference. When I first came to LA - not that long ago - you were just viewed as a European. The first question was always: 'What part of Europe are you from?' Whereas in London you were always an 'Irish actor'. I was able to break away from that in LA."
Of course they've all heard of the Irish now in LA?
"Oh yeah," he laughs. "They're sick of us now."
Even if we view his premature retirement as a prank that misfired, Neeson is, at best, equivocal about the delights of the movie industry. Yet it has treated him well. Though he has never been a superstar of Cruiseian or Pittesque proportions, he has maintained a steady A-list profile since playing the title role in 1993's Schindler's List. And he does admit that the furore surrounding the release of the fourth (or first, if you're a pernickety fanatic) Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace, in 1999 blew him away.
"I'd just done the Jay Leno show, and I was driving past Mann's Chinese cinema in LA," he says. "And the queues were a mile-and-a-half long for the movie. There was a real festive air. I found it terribly moving. There were grown-up men, people with their grandkids, and I thought: Wow! I'm in that picture."
So being a movie star does excite him after all?
"Well, it did with that film. When I saw the first Star Wars, I was still acting at the Belfast Lyric. I remember so clearly going up to see it in the Ormeau Road. As we sat there, we could hear the distant sound of bombs going off, but the cinema was still packed. Everyone was transported by this extraordinary film. So I was dead chuffed to be cast in that film. And as a Jedi to boot!"
One imagines that he is pestered by pale Star Wars enthusiasts asking about arcane details of Jedi lore.
"I haven't really had that," he says generously. "But you can spot the Star Wars fans a mile off. There's a particular pallor they have, like they've all spent far too long in darkened rooms looking at screens."
In K-19: The Widowmaker, Neeson appears as an officer on a crippled Russian nuclear submarine. The commanding submariner is played by Harrison Ford (who must know a thing or two about Star Wars nutters). I ask him if the two men whiled away the hours comparing their experiences on the science fiction franchise. He winces slightly.
"Everybody has asked us that." Oops, sorry. "I don't remember us ever discussing it. Though when one of the younger cast members said, 'Harrison seems in a bad mood today', I did reply, 'Oh, that's because he never got to be a Jedi. I'm a Jedi, he's just Han Solo'."
By all accounts, the notoriously uncommunicative Ford has his fair share of bad moods.
"Well, I like him very much," Neeson says. "But yes, he is very guarded with the press. He's been doing this for a long time and he knows the score, whereas I tend to talk too bloody much. I should take a leaf out of his book."
K-19 is an unlikely project for Hollywood. The true story of a 1961 Soviet naval catastrophe, Bigelow's film is an unremittingly earnest business with no romantic subplots, no gun-play and, most courageously of all, no Americans. The six-foot-four Neeson did not enjoy getting stuffed into all those cramped sets: "It was hellish for the first few weeks: 20 or 30 actors and a film crew of 30 all crammed in this small space. I thought: how can we physically do this? People knocking each other over, bumping each other on the head. Eventually, we found a choreography that worked. But in the early days? Jesus wept!"
For an actor in retirement, Neeson is pretty damn busy. He should be seen in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York at the start of next year (though, given the production's troubled history, who knows). His experience on the film was actually quite painless: "It's just a cameo. I flew into Rome, did a few days, and then flew out. The rest of the gang were there for months."
He was to appear in a fourth Exorcist film (though, as a prequel, chronologically it actually counts as the first. Sound familiar?), but dropped out after the death of director John Frankenheimer.
"When Mr Frankenheimer died, the project died for me. I wanted to work with one of those older directors, it would have been like working with John Ford."
Production on the film is continuing with, of all people, perennial Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader at the helm, but heads will be rotating without Neeson's assistance.
And as you read this, he is starting work in London on Love Actually, the first film directed by Richard Curtis, the writer of Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Doesn't he long to break away from being the steadfast figure of integrity? Doesn't he want to play nasty?
The kestrel brow furrows. "Nasty?"
One doesn't imagine he'll get to chop up any babies in a Richard Curtis flick. Hasn't he had enough of moral avatars such as Oskar Schindler, Michael Collins and Whatever-the-hell-he-was-called in The Phantom Menace?
"I see what you mean," he says. "Well, I'm not complaining. I'm very script-oriented. If it was a part that really got the juices flowing, then maybe. I don't have ambitions like that: 'Oh, I must play the bad guy'."
As Neeson uncoils to his mighty height and says goodbye, he knocks together a grateful smile. Earlier he explained that he enjoyed talking about the work, but he hated yacking about himself. But in truth, though endlessly polite, he has sounded faintly distracted throughout our conversation. Maybe it's the timbre of my voice. Still, at least he didn't threaten to quit on me. u