Liam Neeson

The action hero, 73, talks about taking on comedy with The Naked Gun, the sport he’s terrible at, and his very particular set of skills

- JON BLISTEIN

What's the worst part of success?

Someone once said, “It’s terrible when people are talking about you, and it’s even worse when they’re not talking about you.”

Do you have any acting heroes?

I'll go back to the old days, 40s, 50s. I did very much like Spencer Tracy as a performer, because he was always so real. Without putting on false noses and strange accents and all this sort of shit — he was just always present and real.

How have you tried to embody that in your work?

If the audience believes the words coming out of your mouth, that’s good enough for me.

You haven't done a lot of comedy. What intrigued you about starring in a Naked Gun reboot?

I was approached by Seth MacFarlane to gauge my interest in this. And I did see the original productions, which I enjoyed — they were a good giggle. So, I said I was interested, and we left it at that. Then I got the script, and I thought it was funny, certainly a bunch of giggles.

You were hilarious as yourself in Ricky Gervais's series Life’s Too Short. The conceit was that you wanted to get into comedy and were terrible at it. What do you remember about filming that?