Do we like Liam Neeson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record on gay marriage and vaccine charity work, held back by a narration gig for a film with debunked claims and a nasty 2019 confession.
Neeson was born in Ballymena, County Antrim, in 1952, and came to acting through theatre in Belfast before his film debut in the late 1970s. The big break was Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List, which earned him an Oscar nomination in 1993. Then came the second act nobody saw coming: Taken in 2008 turned the serious stage actor into the world's most reliable action dad.
The messy bit is February 2019. Promoting a film, he told an interviewer about a past episode: after a close friend was assaulted, he went out hoping to be attacked, and he used a racial slur for the man he was imagining. On Good Morning America he said “I'm not a racist” and called it a “primal urge to lash out”, and said he had sought help from a priest. Critics called the remarks racist; he said it was a story about revenge and a lesson he'd learned, and where you land depends on whether you hear the story or the words.
The more recent stoush is December 2025. Neeson narrated Plague of Corruption, a documentary based on a book by Judy Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively, with US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interviewed in it. Reporting describes the film as questioning vaccines and repeating discredited claims. His representatives told The Guardian that “Liam never has been, and is not, anti-vaccination” and that he didn't shape the film's content.
On the harm check, that narration job is the main mark. Heckenlively, who is executive producer and appears in the film, has ties to Alex Jones, according to the Guardian reporting carried by the Irish Examiner. A narrator picks his gigs, and that's a poor one, but nothing in his own words backs the claims. Separately, in 2018 he called the wave of Hollywood misconduct accusations “a bit of a witch hunt” on RTÉ's Late Late Show, which landed badly. I found nothing from him on trans people or the climate, so that's a gap, not a pass.
Nothing new has turned up in the last few months beyond the film and career chatter, so there's no fresh fire to put out. I also found no court cases or lawsuits against him in the sources I checked. The 2019 blowup is old news, but it's still the thing people remember.
The good stuff is real. In 2017 he urged Northern Ireland to let gay, lesbian and transgender people marry, saying “Love, is love, is love.” He has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for years and voiced the Irish 2021 'Get a Vaccine, Give a Vaccine' campaign, which makes the anti-vax tag on him hard to square. That's a long way from someone who profits from harm.