Neeson breaks the silence

Liam Neeson isn’t a man for bull. He always calls it like it is. Like when actors who work with Martin Scorsese suddenly call him “Marty”. The 64-year-old legend has no time for that. “I just think it’s wrong,” he says, his arms folded across a barrel chest. “I don’t know him well enough to call him Marty, so I always address him by his name. When I hear this ‘Marty this, Marty that’ nonsense, what gives you the right to call him that?” Neeson is a busy man today. In a dated hotel suite, he holds court promoting two new movies, A Monster Calls and Scorsese’s Silence, both released on New Year’s Day. And they couldn’t be different. The former is a heartrending children’s fantasy based on a boy’s experiences with his mother’s terminal cancer and the imaginary friend, a mythical tree monster (Neeson) he conjures to help him survive the tragedy, while the latter is a historical epic focused on the brutal persecution of Jesuit priests in Japan in the 1600s. Alongside Adam Driver and Andrew ...