Fellow actors and co-stars have come to the defense of Liam Neeson after he admitted he once set out to kill a black man as revenge for a friend who had been raped.
Actress Michelle Rodriguez, who co-starred with Neeson in last year’s movie “Widows,” lashed out at the fierce criticism her colleague has faced at the amfAR Gala in New York late Wednesday, insisting he was not a racist.
“It’s all [expletive] bullshit,” she told Vanity Fair. “Dude, have you watched ‘Widows’? His tongue was so far down Viola Davis’ throat.”
“You can’t call him a racist ever,” she added. “Racists don’t make out with the race that they hate, especially in the way he does with his tongue – so deep down her throat. I don’t care how good of an actor you are. It’s all bullshit. Ignore it. He’s not a racist. He’s a loving man. It’s all lies.”
Whoopi Goldberg also spoke out during a panel discussion on television, saying she doesn’t believe the 66-year-old “Taken” star is a bigot.
“People walk around sometimes with rage. That’s what happens. Is he a bigot? No. I’ve known him a pretty long time, I think I would have recognized. I’ve been around a lot of real bigots,” she said.
“You can’t be surprised that somebody whose loved one is attacked is angry and wants to go out and attack,” she said.
“So I can say this man is not one.”
Actor Terry Crews also commented on the controversy saying in a tweet: “I believe that every person on earth is capable of the greatest good, or unspeakable evil. Liam is just describing his fork in the road.’
Neeson’s controversial comments were made in an interview to promote his new thriller “Cold Pursuit,” about a father seeking revenge after his son is murdered by a drug gang.
The New York red carpet event on Tuesday for the film was cancelled in the wake of the interview. Neeson’s appearance Friday night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – a top US talk show – has also reportedly been cancelled.
In the bombshell interview, Neeson spoke of “hoping some black bastard would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could...kill him.”
In an attempt at damage control, he spoke with ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, explaining that he knew his behavior was wrong and had sought help from a Catholic priest and friends to come to terms with his behavior.
He also insisted race was not the driving factor behind his actions.
“If she had said an Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian, I know it would have had the same effect,” he told ABC. “I was trying to show honor and stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion.”
“I’m not a racist,” Neeson said on ABC News, while admitting he had felt a “primal urge to lash out” about 40 years ago after hearing from his close friend that she had been attacked by a black man.
The 66-year-old star of “Schindler’s List” triggered an international backlash by sharing his story in an interview with British newspaper The Independent this week.
The Northern Irish actor expanded on the incident, which he said left him shocked at himself.
“I went out deliberately into black areas in the city, looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence,” Neeson recalled. “I did it four, maybe four or five, times until I caught myself and it really shocked me, this primal urge.”
While he says no violence ultimately occurred, Neeson said he sought help from a Catholic priest, spoke to friends, and walked for hours to rid himself of the episode.
But he also insisted race was not the driving factor behind his actions.
By way of explanation, he pointed to his experience growing up in Northern Ireland, at the time locked in a deadly cycle of sectarian violence pitting Catholics against Protestants.
Neeson’s acting career has spanned five decades, and included a star turn in the 2008 hit “Taken” – about a former CIA agent trying to track down his kidnapped daughter.
With his own revelations now threatening to derail his career, Neeson pleaded for his story to be taken as part of a broader, honest debate on race relations.
“We all pretend we’re all politically correct,” he said.
“Sometimes you scratch the surface and discover this racism and bigotry, and it’s there.”
Many of the reactions were unequivocally damning.
Charles Blow, an African American columnist for The New York Times, asked on Twitter if a black actor could have got away with the same thing: “Could Will Smith confess to stalking the streets of Los Angeles for a whole week searching for random white men to kill and get a pass?”
Kovie Biakolo, an African American editor at the BuzzFeed news site, noted a similarity between Neeson’s desire for violent confrontation with a black man and George Zimmerman’s killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in 2012.
“Today is Trayvon’s birthday and I had a thought: What’s the distance between Liam Neeson and George Zimmerman? It gave me pause,” she wrote on Twitter.
Some voices praised Neeson for his candor, however.
Former England footballer John Barnes, who suffered racist abuse during his career, said the actor “deserves a medal” for speaking honestly.
Barnes, who is black, told Sky News that Neeson responded in the way he did because “this is what society has shown him, that black people do, Muslims do – this is what society has wrongly shown him. This is what the media have wrongly portrayed to him.”