SERIOUSLY FUNNY

LIAM NEESON'S NEWEST SKILL - MAKING YOU GIGGLE

- STORY: TIMOTHY BELLA / NYT

There's a line from Anthony Hopkins that Liam Neeson likes to share. Anytime Neeson asks him how he's doing, Hopkins tells him: "Great. I haven't been found out yet.

At 73, Neeson feels like he hasn't been found out yet either. Once dubbed the heir apparent to Sean Connery's sweeping romantic grandeur, Neeson, with his broad trajectory and catalogue of more than 100 Hollywood films, is arguably as interesting as any actor today.

He can claim awards bait with Schindler's List and Michael Collins, franchise blockbusters with Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace and Batman Begins, and fan favourites with Love Actually and The Lego Movie.

And that's before you consider the long list of action-film ass-kickers this Oscarand Tony-nominated star has played, which established his identity for a generation of fans. That's largely thanks to the surprising success of the Taken franchise, built around Neeson as a father with a very particular set of skills who will find you and kill you if you kidnap his daughter. It has been a career that has kept him and his viewers guessing at what might come next.

"I'm honestly not trying to change," he said of all the changes. "It wasn't deliberate, but there's been a lot of this for me."

Neeson says this inside the 3rd-floor screening room at Paramount's building in Times Square on a humid Tuesday afternoon in July. If you haven't figured out why you can't escape his face lately, it's part of his next change.

He is starring in The Naked Gun, the reboot of the crime-spoof comedy franchise from the 80s and 90s. The film will serve as a test for whether the brand of straight-man intensity that made Neeson an action-film favourite can translate to the level of laughs produced by Leslie Nielsen, his predecessor in the trilogy. (Neeson is playing Nielsen's son, Frank Drebin Jr, in the film, which also stars Pamela Anderson and Paul Walter Hauser.)