Forty years ago this story wouldn’t even have rated being buried on the bottom of page 38 in the Hamilton Spectator.
Even 20 years ago I doubt it would have warranted more than a small paragraph.
Fast forward to 2018 and it’s a world wide headline grabber.
Wednesday’s Australian banner shouts out “Liam Neeson defends ‘primal urge to lash out’ at black man.” A casual glance around the world media will give you everything you either did or didn’t want to hear. “Liam Neeson; I’m not racist,” “Liam Neeson shares story about looking for a black person to kill” and “The New York red carpet opening of Liam Neeson’s latest film has been cancelled amid racism row.”
Liam Neeson has made a good living from portraying the man who gets even and exacts revenge for naughty deeds by the baddies and rescues young maidens from fates worse than death. His revelations this week reveals that perhaps when Oscar Wilde penned in 1889 that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”, dear old Oscar got it wrong and in Liam’s case his “art reflects his life”.
The story goes like this and was revealed when doing a promotion for his latest film: “We were doing a press junket and the topic of the film is revenge, it’s a dark comedy too, but its base is revenge. And the lady journalist was asking me ‘How do you tap into that?’ and I remembered an incident, nearly 40 years ago, where a very dear friend of mine was brutally raped and I was out of the country, and when I came back she told me about this. I asked her ‘Did you know the person?’, it was a man … no. ‘His race?’ She said he was a black man. I thought ‘OK …’ And after that there were some nights I went out deliberately into black areas armed with a cosh, looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence. I did it four, maybe four or five, times until I caught myself and it really shocked me, this primal urge. It shocked me and it hurt me.”
Neeson’s reasoning for bringing up this story was in his own words, “To talk, to open up, to talk about these things. We all pretend we are all politically correct, I mean, in this country, it’s the same in my own, sometimes you scratch the surface and discover this racism and bigotry, and it’s there.”
Read the article by Peter Moore in the Geelong Advertiser.