He might now be the reigning king of the shoot ‘em up revenge movie and the star of the Naked Gun reboot, but Liam Neeson could’ve jumped on the action wagon far earlier—and as one of Britain’s most iconic pop culture figures, no doubt. In a 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, Neeson revealed that he was contacted “a couple of times” by James Bond franchise producer Barbara Broccoli in the ‘90s, following his Oscar-nominated success with Schindler’s List, about portraying the world’s most famous double-O, James Bond. So what stopped him?
According to Neeson, his wife and fellow actor Natasha Richardson played a pivotal role in his decision-making. “I know the Broccolis. They looked at a bunch of actors,” Neeson said. “Schindler’s List had come out and Barbara [Broccoli] had called me a couple of times to ask if I was interested, and I said, ‘Yes, I would be interested.’ And then my lovely wife [Natasha Richardson], God rest her soul, said to me while we were shooting Nell down in the Carolinas, ‘Liam, I want to tell you something: If you play James Bond, we’re not getting married.’”
So 1995’s GoldenEye ultimately ended up going to Neeson’s fellow Irishman, Pierce Brosnan, and the rest is history. (Sidenote: just imagine, now, Liam Neeson’s face rendered in blocky N64 form for Rare’s GoldenEye couch shooter.) He picked love over the license to kill—a decision that Bond himself would take another 26 years to make, with the conclusion of Daniel Craig’s No Time to Die. Even after passing on the role, Neeson noted, “I would tease [Richardson] by going behind her back, making my fingers as though I’m holding a gun, and then [hums the James Bond theme],” he continued. “I loved doing that shit!”
It was a Bond ultimatum, but one that paid dividends with a decade and a half of marriage, before Richardson’s untimely passing in 2009. “And she meant [the ultimatum]! Come on, there are all those gorgeous girls in various countries getting into bed and getting out of bed. I’m sure a lot of her decision-making was based on that!”
Bond isn’t the only iconic role the actor is known for having waved off. Neeson was supposedly director Peter Jackson’s first choice for the part of Boromir—the eldest son of Denethor II, the Steward of Gondor—in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Neeson reportedly didn’t want to play a character who (spoiler alert) dies at the end of the first movie in a trilogy; the part that could have been Neeson’s instead went to Sean Bean, himself an alumnus of the Bond films (he played Alec Trevelyan, the disfigured rogue MI6 agent who makes life hard for Pierce Brosnan’s 007 in Goldeneye) and an actor who is famously OK with dying at any time in any project.
Neeson did sink his teeth into proper franchise fare—and early-trilogy death scenes— in the ‘90s with his starring part as Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars revival The Phantom Menace, reprising the role for a brief end-of-season cameo as a Force ghost in Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series. But that, it seems, will be his last Jedi-robed performance for now, with the actor snubbing the idea of his own spin-off show in conversation with Watch What Happens Live! Asked if he was interested in portraying Qui-Gon again, he said: “No, I’m not. There are so many spin-offs of Star Wars. It’s diluting it to me, and it’s taken away the mystery and the magic in a weird way.” One payday is enough, I guess.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
