On Monday, Liam Neeson decided it was time to share a bleak and alarming action from his past that no one had asked to hear. The 66-year-old actor said that when he was younger, he wanted to "unleash physical violence" on a random black man after a friend revealed to him that she was raped. He admitted that he spent "maybe a week" going out, hoping to kill a black man under the guise of revenge.
He's since said that he felt ashamed to admit it, and that he's "not a racist." Appearing on Good Morning America, he explained, "It was horrible, horrible when I think back, that I did that .... It’s awful, but I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing?" Neeson, who waited until Black History Month to make this startling revelation, said that he hopes his story will allow people to talk more about the state of racism in America.
"We all pretend we're kind of politically correct," he continued. "I mean, in this country, it's the same in my own country too, you sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism and bigotry, and it's there." Understandably, reactions to his story have ranged from pure confusion to outright horror.
Terry Crews, however, called Neeson's admission him "describing his fork in the road." Wale disapproved of Crews offering his compassion to Neeson. "Na. No. Nope. Liam is trash," Wale said in a quote-tweet of Crews' comments. "We losin' brothers all the time because of this proverbial 'fork.' Na fam."
It felt like only yesterday we were all laughing about his claim that a horse on a set remembered him from another film he previously shot. Check out some of the reactions to Neeson's worrying story and subsequent apology below.
