So, this story is uhh… look, it’s odd. During a press junket for his new movie, “Cold Pursuit”, while sitting next to co-star Tom Bateman, Liam Neeson dropped a terrifying story that makes him look like a terrifying person when he talked casually about waiting to murder random black men on the street due to a sexual assault that happened to a relative of his. In an article titled: “Liam Neeson interview: Rape, race and how I learnt revenge doesn’t work” for The Independent, Liam Neeson said the following:
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?”
He continues, more generally, about violence on screen. His tone changes. We’re back, suddenly, to a normal junket interview. But this had not been the average confession to make. As he had admitted, it’s horrible, awful. Is it possible to hear that said out loud or to read those words and not judge? Then again, think of the circumstance – he had learnt someone close to him had been raped. No one would ever want to have to confront that in their own life. Do other people react that way?
So it certainly seems as if this interview just revealed that Liam Neeson admitted, without knowing the full weight of his admission, to trying to murder random black men on the street. Even though he managed to try to justify it by tying it to a rape, it’s still a series of randomly orchestrated murders on men of the same race as an alleged attacker.
The Independent contacted Laura Palumbo of the National Sexual Violence Resource Centre in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is a sure sign that your fluff interview about wether or not pranks were played on the set has gone a little off the rails, and she discussed the trauma that loved ones of survivors often feel, wondering what else they could have done, but pointed out that Neeson’s bigotry most likely came from a bias that happened before the incident.
Well. What about you, buddy? What do you think of this horrifying story? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter at @WhatsTrending
