Liam Neeson was convinced that Taken would bomb

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

It's been close to fifteen years since Liam Neeson began a whole new stage of his career with TAKEN. The action/thriller found Neeson starring as Bryan Mills, a former CIA operative who set about tracking down his teenage daughter Kim (Grace) and her best friend Amanda (Cassidy) after the two girls were kidnapped by Albanian human traffickers while traveling in France during a vacation. The film was a huge hit and spawned two sequels as well as a TV series and led to Liam Neeson taking the lead in a handful of other action-heavy flicks.

While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Neeson said that he wasn't convinced that TAKEN would succeed. "I’ve said this before," Neeson explained, "and no offense to Robert Kamen, our wonderful writer and my pal, but I thought, 'Well, this is going to go straight-to-video. A short little European thriller, it might play okay for a couple weeks in France and then it will go straight-to-video.' But it did well in France and then it went straight to South Korea, and it did very well there." Neeson continued, "Fox took it and they very cleverly did a good trailer and put it during various sporting events around the country and they made it a real success. I remember the first weekend it came in at No. 3, and then it came up to No. 2 and then No. 1, and then it went down to No. 4, and it came up to No. 3 again. It just had this extraordinary cycle." Although Neeson believed that TAKEN would be a flop, it didn't stop him from pursuing the project in the first place.

My dear departed wife [Natasha Richardson] and I were at a film festival in Shanghai, she had a film there, and [Taken producer] Luc Besson was on the jury. I had read this Taken script and I approached him there and said, “Look, I’m sure I’m nowhere near your list of actors for this, but I used to be a boxer, I love doing fight scenes, I’ve done quite a few sorcery movies with swords and s—. Please think of me for this.” Push came to shove and he offered it to me. And I obviously was a kid in a toy shop doing it, hanging with these stunt guys and working on these fight scenes and arms training — I loved it.

Liam Neeson can currently be seen starring in MADE IN ITALY as a father who travels to Tuscany along with his estranged son in order to restore a crumbling house he inherited from his late wife. The actor also has another action/thriller on the way with HONEST THIEF, which is slated to hit theaters on October 9, 2020.