Liam Neeson Turned Down ‘Atlanta’ Cameo — Until Jordan Peele Helped Donald Glover Convince Him
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Coming back from admitting to having a deeply unsettling racist revenge fantasy is something Liam Neeson had to figure out in real-time in 2019. Two months after issuing an apology for sharing a story about carrying a weapon while seeking out “some ‘black bastard'” after a female friend was raped, the actor resolved not to engage with the story again. It was why he initially turned down a cameo in Donald Glover’s comedy-drama series Atlanta in 2022, but a few phone calls wore him down.
“When I got in touch with him, Liam poured his heart out,” Glover told GQ in a recent interview. “He was like, ‘I am embarrassed. I don’t know about this. I’m trying to get away from that.’ And I was like, ‘Man, I’m telling you, this will be funny! And you’ll actually get a lot of cream from it because it’ll show you’re sorry’…So, he asked me to let him think about it. Then he sent me an email saying, ‘I don’t think I can do it and best of luck with Atlanta, blah-blah-blah.’”
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Speaking to Rolling Stone earlier this year, Neeson described the incident — which he willingly recounted to The Independent during a press junket — as “a painful memory for many reasons,” stating that when he first got the call from Glover, he didn’t want to reignite the fire he had just put out. “He was working on [Mr. & Mrs. Smith] with the lovely Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and she had said, ‘Look, this is cool. You should do this,'” Neeson said. “And I thought, ‘Maybe I should? Fuck it. I trust Donald. He knows the Black community.'”
But as Glover tells it, it took a little more convincing than that. “Liam said [after the incident] he talked to Morgan Freeman, Jordan Peele, and Spike Lee,” Glover recalled to GQ. “So I was like…Jordan Peele! I hit Jordan Peele up, and I was like, ‘Look, man, I got this idea. He said that he trusted you. Tell him it’s a good idea!’…Jordan thought it was hilarious! So Jordan talked to him. Liam hit me back and said he talked to Jordan and his son and thought it’d actually be a good thing. But what was so funny is, like, I forgot to hit Jordan back. I was so excited about Liam doing it. So Jordan hit a friend of mine, and was like, ‘Am I on a prank show where Donald got me to forgive Liam Neeson? Was this a joke…on me?’”
In the scene, which appeared during the eighth episode of Atlanta’s fourth season, Neeson appears as himself and acts opposite Brian Tyree Henry, who plays Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles. Sitting at a bar with napkins branded “Cancel Club,” the actor tells Paper Boi: “You might’ve heard or read about my transgression. You know, what I said about what I wanted to do to a Black guy, any Black guy, when I was a younger man in London. A friend of mine had been raped, and I acted out of anger. I look back now, and it honestly frightens me. I thought people knowing who I once was would make clear who I am, who I’ve become. But with all that being said, I am sorry. I apologize if I hurt people.”
It’s a SparkNotes version of the longer apology he issued in 2019 in which he addressed the danger of expressing such thoughts “at a time when language is so often weaponized and an entire community of innocent people are targeted in acts of rage.” But on Atlanta, Glover was in charge of the language, having written the episode.
After Paper Boi tells Neeson that it’s “good to know that you don’t hate Black people now,” and he still “fucks with Taken,” the actor responds: “No, no I can’t stand the lot of you. Well, now I feel that way because you tried to ruin my career. Didn’t succeed, mind you. However, I’m sure one day I will get over it, but until then, we are mortal enemies.”
He added: “I also learned that the best and worst part of being white is that we don’t have to learn anything if we don’t want to.”
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