Liam Neeson spots fellow Irishman Gabriel Byrne in a Toronto coffee shop and excuses himself from an interview to share hugs and updates.
Neeson apologizes for the interruption, but the chance to reconnect proves irresistible. Neeson has retrenched from the industry’s social scene a tad. He and his wife, actress Natasha Richardson, and their 10- and 11- year-old boys moved from Manhattan to upstate New York in the fall.
“As much as I love the city, I just wanted a different tempo; my kids walk down a country lane to a bus,” says Neeson, the Oscar-nominated star of “Schindler’s List” and a towering presence in blockbuster fare such as “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” and “Batman Returns.” Neeson has found a change of pace onscreen as well.
As a kid in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, he watched B movies with the same passion he used to dispatch opponents in the boxing ring. His latest project, “Seraphim Falls,” has him starring in a classic American genre.
“I always wanted to do a Western,” he says. “It’s like a childhood dream.”
On the first day of saddling up for “Seraphim Falls,” opening today, the reality hit him and co-star Pierce Brosnan like glass in a saloon brawl. They burst out laughing that two lads from Ireland would be headlining a shoot-’em-up on horseback.
Brosnan held imaginary reins and galloped as if on a stallion, telling Neeson that they wouldn’t have to pretend any longer. “My ideal would have been to be among John Ford’s actors,” Neeson says of the famous director of Westerns.
In “Seraphim Falls,” Neeson tries his hand at the most elemental Western form: the chase. His Confederate officer seeks revenge on Brosnan’s Union rival for an alleged wrong committed during the war. Neeson stalks a wounded Brosnan in a duel of wits and guts through the snow and desert.
The dialogue is spare, leaving one to wonder if a nearly blank page can make a stage-honed actor such as Neeson uncomfortable. “Movies are about images,” he says. “You have to trust the fact that you are enough.”
Neeson has leaped over the quicksand of middle age and continues to land significant roles. His eponymous sex researcher in “Kinsey” was award-worthy. His voice will be heard as the resurrected lion Aslan in next year’s “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.”
And now that his family has settled into country digs, he and director Steven Spielberg will pursue their long-delayed Abraham Lincoln project, based on a biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Neeson has no explanation, no plan for sustained employment, offering only that he is blessed. He remains afflicted with a disease that is more common than a cold among struggling actors: worry over when the next job will come.
“You never lose that, never,” he says. “Pierce and I were just talking about that. What’s the matter with us? My wife always says, ‘You always see the glass half-empty, and why don’t you ever see it half-full?’ That’s the way I am.”
