It begins as an explanation of how his latest character turns to anger. “There’s something primal – God forbid you’ve ever had a member of your family hurt under criminal conditions,” he begins, hesitantly but thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you a story. This is true.”
It was some time ago. Neeson had just come back from
overseas to find out about the rape. “She handled the
situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way,”
Neeson says. “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.”(1)
The reaction - you'll recall - to these words was swift and unanimously negative. I saw it myself here on the other side of the planet, in my Facebook news feed, and on CNN. It was so swift, in fact, that Neeson found it necessary to appear on Good Morning America the very next day (Tuesday) to reassure us that, according to The Washington Post,
“I’m not racist. This was nearly 40 years ago . . . I had never
felt this feeling before which was a primal urge to lash out.”
The actor added that he believes he would have gone
through with his plan if the opportunity arose, but that he
would have reacted the same way if the rapist had been
white because “I did want to lash out, yes, because my
friend was brutally raped and I thought I was defending her
honor.”
“If she had said an Irish, or a Scot, or a Brit, or a Lithuanian,
I know I would’ve felt the same effect. I was trying to . . .
stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion,”
he said. “I’m a fairly intelligent guy, that’s why it kind of shocked
me when I came down to earth after having these horrible
feelings,” he added. “Luckily no violence occurred — ever.
Thanks be to God.”
Neeson said he thinks people can unconsciously harbor
racist thoughts. “We all pretend we’re kind of politically correct.
I mean, in this country, it’s the same in my own country, too, you
sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism
and bigotry, and it’s there,” he told [Robin] Roberts.(2)
However misguided Neeson's remarks were, how he meant them to be taken and the way they were taken by everyone who heard them were poles apart. In the Independent interview, he spoke about his childhood, growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. (He's now 66, so he was 18 in 1970.)
“I come from a society – I grew up in Northern Ireland in the
Troubles – and, you know, I knew a couple of guys that died on
hunger strike, and I had acquaintances who were very caught up
in the Troubles, and I understand that need for revenge, but it
just leads to more revenge, to more killing and more killing, and
Northern Ireland’s proof of that. All this stuff that’s happening
in the world, the violence, is proof of that, you know. But that
primal need, I understand.”
Neeson had a tough upbringing. He's a tough guy. He has certainly been playing tough characters for the last ten years of his career, even though they look and - more significantly - move more easefully than he can (he said he was giving up action films in two years - four years ago). He was doing a junket - a day-long marathon of short interviews with dozens of journalists from all over the world plugging his latest movie in release. He was maybe a little tired of answering the same question for the umpteenth time and he tried to pull out of himself something a little more personal than the same old answers he had already supplied a dozen or more times. His story, if true, is truly terrible. If he had encountered a "black bastard" when he went on his rampage - a rampage that, astonishingly, went on, he said, for a week, "maybe a week and a half" - would he have carried out his vengeful plan and, if he had been confronted, beaten the man to death?
Neeson reminds me of something I read a long time ago, not at the time it was published (I was 4 years old), but some years later. In 1962, Miles Davis was interviewed by Alex Haley for Playboy. It was an eye-opening conversation. Haley asked him, "Do you, in your position as a famous Negro, meet prejudice?"
Davis : I told you, someway or other, every Negro meets it, I don't care who he is! . . .
Haley : Have you always been so sensitive about being a Negro?
Davis : About the first thing I can remember as a little boy was a white man running me down a street hollering "Nigger! Nigger!"
Davis was speaking from a life experience as a "negro" (he was 36 in 1962). What he wanted us to know was how a decade of success and fame as a world-renowned jazz artist didn't matter a damn when he walked down the street anywhere in America.
Late in his life Davis gave Jet magazine a further glimpse of what his experience had taught him: "If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow."(3) How was this statement reported in the press? Did it shock or surprise anyone? Notice Davis didn't specify an individual white man. Any white man would do. He wasn't in a rage over some isolated incident. It was his reaction, his response, to a lifetime as a black man in a racist society.
But how is his statement different from Liam Neeson's? Wasn't Davis a racist?
(1) "Liam Neeson interview: Rape, race and how I learnt revenge doesn’t work Exclusive: Sitting down with Clémence Michallon to discuss his latest action film ‘Cold Pursuit’, the actor recounts a disturbing incident from his past," by Clémence Michallon, The Independent, February 4, 2019.
(2) "‘I’m not racist’: Liam Neeson expounds on comments that he wanted to kill a black person to avenge friend’s rape," by Sonia Rao and Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post, February 5, 2019.
(3) Jet, 25 March 1985.
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