Liam Neeson is ready to act his age, but not everyone is willing to let a man with his very particular set of skills do so.

“I’m still offered parts where it will say, ‘here’s the character, Joe Blow, he’s 50 years of age’. No, he’s not. If you want me, he’s got to be 70, or in his late 60s. You can’t cheat audiences. They just know,” Neeson tells The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Liam Neeson plays a hitman with Alzheimer’s disease in Memory. Credit:Amazon Prime Video

Neeson turned 70 in June, “though I prefer to say soixante-dix,” he jokes, and in his latest movie he is in territory familiar and not.

In Memory, Neeson plays a hitman (so far, so normal), whose rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s disease has forced him to scrawl reminders of his target details on his arm lest he forget.

Though it’s a remake of the 2003 Belgian movie De Zaak Alzheimer (aka The Memory of a Killer), it occasionally brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Memento, in no small part because that film’s memory-addled star Guy Pearce appears here as an El Paso cop on Neeson’s trail.

“I put a lot of research into it,” says Neeson. “It was fascinating and quite horrific at the same time. I have a friend in his early 50s back home in Ireland who’s got early-onset, and my god it’s horrible, just horrible.”

When I last spoke to Neeson earlier in the year, when Blacklight, the film he shot in Melbourne in late 2020, was released, he stressed that he and his stunt co-ordinator Mark Vanselow, with whom he has made 26 movies, “try and make it that I’m not trying to be 30 years of age, or even 40 years of age”.

It was important, he said, “for audiences to see that I get hurt, that I have trouble getting up off the ground”.

Neeson has no trouble getting projects off the ground – his IMDB credits list seven projects in 2022 (including Blacklight and Memory) plus two more in post-production and three more in pre-production – but he’s increasingly keen that the work should reflect the reality of his stage of life.

“You become aware of your mortality,” he says. “You think about friends you went to school with, or actors you acted with a number of years ago, and you look them up on IMDB and you find they died last year or two years ago. That’s happening more and more, you know.”

Guy Pearce is on the other side of the memory-loss scenario in this one.Credit:Rico Torres/AP

Do you think that in some way addressing the idea of mortality, of the failing body and fading mind, on screen helps you to accept them in real life?

“Yeah, I think it does, because you’re part of storytelling, albeit with the bells and whistles and wonderful technical achievements of Hollywood. But you’re still storytelling.

“I come from a nation of storytellers, and without blowing smoke up Ireland’s arse, we’re renowned for it, and I’m kind of proud of that and I want to keep that tradition going,” he says. “And part of that is facing one’s age. I want to face my age on screen. I really do.”

That doesn’t mean he’s about to give up the ghost any time soon – no one intending to retire has that much work lined up, surely. It simply means staring reality in the face, and reflecting it on the screen.

“I try to keep reasonably fit and keep engaged with humanity and what’s happening in the world and try and do your bit to change it if it’s applicable,” he says. “All that stuff that goes with age, it did frighten me at one stage. But you just have to accept it and carry on.”

Memory is on Amazon Prime Video.

Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.

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