Liam Neeson thought iconic Taken phone scene was “corny”

Liam Neeson has said that he wasn’t such a fan of his iconic phone scene from Taken (2008) at first.

The scene sees Neeson’s character Bryan Mills threatening the person who kidnapped his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) over the phone, which birthed the famous line “I have a particular set of skills.”

The actor has said numerous times over the years that he never expected the action film, which spawned two sequels in 2012 and 2014, to be as successful with fans as it actually was.

“I certainly did sound scary, but I thought it was corny,” Neeson told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “It was a cornball. I really did feel that. It’s nice to be proven wrong.”

Neeson previously told Entertainment Weekly in 2020 that at the time, he thought Taken would become a box office flop.

Liam Neeson CREDIT: Carlos R. Alvarez/WireImage

“I thought, ‘Well, this is going to go straight-to-video. A short little European thriller, it might play okay for a couple weeks in France and then it will go straight-to-video,’” he said. “But Fox took it and they very cleverly did a good trailer and put it during various sporting events around the country and they made it a real success. I remember the first weekend it came in at No. 3, and then it came up to No. 2 and then No. 1, and then it went down to No. 4, and it came up to No. 3 again. It just had this extraordinary cycle.”

That said, Neeson has also previously said that he enjoyed shooting Taken and appreciated how many doors it opened for his film career.

“I had no idea that it would lead onto other films and other action scripts,” Neeson told the same publication in 2019. “They started sending me action scripts and you’d see ‘Leading man, age 37’ crossed out and ‘late 40s, early 50s’ written in instead. I feel very privileged, and a little bit guilty. I’m having fight scenes with guys half my age and I just can’t stop laughing.”

Neeson recently made headlines by calling Conor McGregor “a little leprechaun”, saying he had given Ireland “a bad name”.

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