Hollywood actor Liam Neeson is set to appear in the third series of the critically acclaimed series Atlanta – where he directly addresses a 2019 controversy that threatened to end his career.
Neeson was accused of racism after a 2019 interview with The Independent, where he spoke about wanting to kill a Black person out of sheer vengeance after he found out his friend had been raped.
Having kept a fairly low profile since that interview, and the subsequent media storm it created, the Northern Irishman has now tackled it head on in his Atlanta appearance.
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In the episode titled 'New Jazz', we see Alfred Miles, aka Paper Boi, hallucinating in Amsterdam after a few too many space cakes.
This leads to the following encounter with Neeson in the aptly named 'Cancel Club'. Watch the clip for yourself below.
Neeson's original comments came in reference to his close friend's trauma, and the anger he felt in the days that followed it.
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He described "going 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 ‘Black b****d’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.”
However, in Atlanta, we see a dialogue between Al and Neeson, where the 69-year-old appears repentant for his comments.
After Al remarks that it’s 'good to know that you don’t hate Black people now', this version of Neeson responds: “No, no, no, I can’t stand the lot of ya… I feel that way because you tried to ruin my career. Didn’t succeed, mind you.”
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When a saddened Al asks the actor if he’s learned not to say comments like that, Neeson acknowledges he did, before stating: “But I also learned the best and worst part about being white is you don’t have to learn anything if you don’t want to.”
Neeson's appearance in the show, which can be found on Disney+, is just his second acting cameo since the racism incident, as he also had a small one-off role in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls earlier this year.
It certainly got people talking on social media.
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Created by and starring Donald Glover, Atlanta’s third season shifts location to Europe as Earn (Glover) joins Paper Boi on his rap tour
"They really got Liam Neeson to say the quiet part out loud," on person wrote on Twitter, referring to the line about not needing to learn anything if you're white.
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Another simply asked if this was a "confessional."
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Topics: Film and TV
Tom Fenton