Star Wars: Liam Neeson
By Christine Spines
Jab. Slash. Swoosh.
With giant thrusts of his arm, Liam Neeson repeatedly stabs at
nothing. His enormous hand, clenched into a fist the size of
a coconut, penetrates the thin air with deadly precision. Each
pierce is executed with the focus and deliberation of a chess
champion. Careful not to topple the glass of pinot noir resting
on the small table in front of him, he demonstrates the eight
basic death moves of light-saber dueling.
Neeson exudes such
guileless joy as he wields his pretend sword that it's hard to
believe this is the same actor who's made a name for himself
playing such portentous historical figures as Rob Roy, Michael
Collins, and Oskar Schindler. But despite a career spent honing
his craft in period pieces and costume dramas, the 46-year-old
actor is relishing the prospect of starring in a movie that's
making history as opposed to re-creating it. This fin-de-siècle
cinematic event is, of course, none other than George Lucas's
long-awaited Star Wars prequel, Episode I—The Phantom Menace,
in which Neeson plays Qui-Gon Jinn, a paternal Jedi Knight who
bestows his Force-ful wisdom upon Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor)
and the young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd). Star Wars movies
have never been thought of as fertile soil for memorable acting
(Alec Guinness's Academy Award nomination notwithstanding). But
Neeson, who grew up in a working-class Irish farming community
and still talks worriedly about paying his mortgages, was seduced
by the possibility of being Big Jedi on Campus. "The idea
of playing a Jedi appealed to me," Neeson says. "It
wasn't some creature with a vagina coming out of its forehead,
you know what I mean?"
Neeson is still experiencing
the side effects of the moviemaking equivalent of Viagra: Since
the Star Wars shoot, his staple on-set joke has been "I
can do that, I'm a Jedi Knight." But his reasons for vigorously
pursuing the role—he convinced Lucas, who had originally
envisioned Qui-Gon Jinn as a 60-year-old, to take a few years
off the character—were also pragmatic. "Nobody's interested
if you played the greatest Hamlet in Christendom," says
Neeson, who played Oscar Wilde on Broadway last year. "They're
interested in what your last movie did. That opens doors and
gets you work." |
You'll recall Qui-Gon having sold Anakin's
Pod Racer after the Race on Boonta eve. It turns out that it was
sold to a very insistent Dug.
