Source: Francois G. Durand / Getty
While talking about his new movie Cold Pursuit with The Independent, Liam Neeson made a disturbing confession. Discussing revenge, as it pertains to his film, Neeson admits he looked for the opportunity to kill a random “Black bastard” after his friend said she was raped by a Black man.
“I’ll tell you a story—this is true. I’m not going to use any names but I was away and I came back and she told me she had been raped,” Neeson began. “She handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way, but my immediate reaction was…I asked did she know who it was? No. What color were they? She said it was a Black person.”
What Neeson said next has everyone pretty disgusted. “I’ve gone up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody. I’m ashamed to say that…and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson gestures air quotes with his fingers] ‘Black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him…it took me a week, maybe a week and a half, to go through that.”
“She says ‘where are you going?’ and I say ‘I’m just going for a walk’ you know?” he adds, saying that he told his friend he was fine. “It was horrible, horrible when I think back that I did that.”
Neeson says it was “awful” but that he learned a lesson from it—he eventually came to realize that while he understands the “need for revenge,” it just leads to more revenge and more killing. Listen to Neeson tell his story here, plus some reactions from social media below.
