On more than one occasion, Liam Neeson has claimed that his retirement from the action genre is imminent, with the actor going so far as to almost laugh at the notion of audiences wanting to see him indulge in his favorite onscreen pastime for much longer.
The veteran ass-kicker turns 70 years old in June, but he still hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. He’s appeared in Honest Thief, The Marksman, and The Ice Road in the last sixteen months, while Blacklight hit theaters this past Friday, and he’s still got Memory, Retribution, Marlowe, and In the Land of Saints and Sinners on the way.
However, he continues to hint that his days of running and gunning might be drawing to a close, as he revealed during a recent interview with Today.
“I turn 70 this year, so I’m still getting away with it. I think the action movies will draw to a close — they have to. Audiences aren’t stupid, you know. They’re gonna go, ‘Oh, f*ck this guy, Liam Neeson. He’s got to be 71, 72, 73…’ I’ll stop at some stage.”
Based on how regularly he’s touted his exit from tooling up and taking the fight to his enemies without actually getting around to it, it’s growing increasingly likely that the only way Neeson will bow out from the mid budget action thriller is if people stop offering him the lead roles in them.
That doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon, though, so the grizzled badass might just have enough in the tank to keep going for a couple more years.