Oh wow.
So, you may or may not know, but Liam Neeson recently came out with some pretty outrageous statements.
While promoting his latest film Cold Pursuit, he spoke about a personal story.
The Taken actor was talking about how his new character turns to rage, then launched into his story:
“There’s something primal – God forbid you’ve ever had a member of your family hurt under criminal conditions. I’ll tell you a story. This is true.”
He spoke of a time where a dear friend of his had been raped.
“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 colour were they? She said it was a black person.”
“I went 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 would say, ‘where are you going?’ and I would say, ‘I’m just going out for a walk’. You know? ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘No no, nothing’s wrong’.
“It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that. And I’ve never admitted that, and I’m saying it to a journalist. God forbid.”
“It’s awful. But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the f*** are you doing’, you know?”
Anyway, as you can imagine, his comments have been met with a LOT of backlash.
In fact, Piers Morgan likened Liam’s tale to Ku Klux Klan’ level racism during Good Morning Britain today.
He said:
“I’ve met him a few times, he’s a very good guy to interview, very intelligent, so you can’t blame stupidity for this.”
“When you hear it coming from his own mouth, it’s one of the most extraordinary interviews I’ve think I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
“There seems to be no self awareness in Neeson about how offensive what he’s saying is.”
“If I was a black man, I would just find that unspeakable. Just the purest personification of racism, right there.”
“Because a black person might have done a bad thing to my friend, I’m going to kill any black person I can find. That is racism! That is Ku Klux Klan stuff, sorry it is!”
