It’s all the time fascinating to learn the way actors select their roles. In his autobiography, as an example, Bryan Cranston laid out an elaborate calculation the place he grades every potential film on the standard of its story, textual content, position, director and forged. In the meantime, much less mathematically, Bob Hoskins utilised what he known as the “chilly bum check”: he learn his scripts on the bathroom and, if he saved studying one for thus lengthy that his bum acquired chilly, that was an indication that he ought to settle for the half.
After which now we have Liam Neeson. Now that his profession has seemingly totally recovered from that weird interview by which he mentioned he as soon as walked the streets in search of a black man to homicide, he’s selling his motion pictures within the regular method once more. And, throughout an interview to advertise his new crime thriller Marlowe, Neeson occurred to disclose how he picks his motion pictures.
Clearly, had this query been requested of him a decade in the past his standards would have most likely been: “Is it so utterly an identical to the primary Taken movie that no one will be capable to inform the distinction?” However Neeson is slightly older now, and he has began to make motion pictures that don’t merely depend on his capacity to sigh and punch individuals. As an alternative, he told Yahoo, he makes use of a easy trick often called the “cup of tea check”.
“If my agent sends me a script, and I get to web page 5 and I feel [distractedly] ‘Oh, I have to make some tea,’ that’s not signal,” Neeson mentioned. However, if he can learn a script from begin to end and solely take into consideration making a cup of tea on the finish, then that could be a good signal.
We are able to discern two key items of knowledge right here. The primary is that Liam Neeson likes to place himself within the place of the viewers when studying a script. If the film can’t maintain his consideration, there is no such thing as a probability that it’ll maintain the eye of the common punter on the road. That is strong, well-liked, gut-instinct decision-making from a person with much more expertise than most.
The opposite key piece of knowledge is that this: Jesus Christ, Liam Neeson is obsessive about tea. Like, he’s totally obsessed. Tea haunts Liam Neeson’s each waking second. The person is so monomaniacal about cups of tea that you simply sense he solely reads scripts within the first place in a doomed bid to briefly banish all considered them from his thoughts.
By Liam Neeson’s requirements, then even after ending script – even after ending the best script ever written – his first thought gained’t be a vital evaluation of the workload it requires of him, however gratuitous reduction that he lastly will get to commit extra of his time to fascinated about tea once more.
Hear, perhaps I’m incorrect right here. Perhaps, as somebody who can usually go a number of hours at a time with out considering a single considered tea, I’m the weirdo. Perhaps I’m within the minority, and everybody else is so fixated on tea that they will’t even learn 5 pages of a screenplay with out peeling away, misplaced in a deep and great reverie about all of the totally different cups of tea they’d prefer to drink. If that’s the case, I apologise.
However I don’t assume that is the case. I don’t assume anybody on Earth loves tea as a lot as Liam Neeson loves tea. Liam Neeson’s enjoyment of tea appears to transcend the traditional human tea parameters. He looks like he’s addicted. It’s worrying.
Nonetheless, if the cup of tea check works for Liam Neeson, then it really works. He has constructed a nice filmography over time on this standards. What’s extra, this additionally acts as a useful lesson for budding characteristic writers. If you would like Liam Neeson to be in your movie, completely not at all ought to your script point out tea. As quickly because it does, Liam Neeson will drop the script to the ground and stroll to the kitchen in a fugue state to fill a shower of tea and sit in it, and your masterpiece will likely be misplaced to the world for ever.
