Watch Liam Neeson Get Taken Down in a Vintage 'Miami Vice' Clip
Before he became one of Hollywood’s A-list Irishmen, Liam Neeson was just another aspiring ’80s actor with a cocksure grin and a borderline-mullet hairdo. And while it seems his IMDb page has been over-Taken by action flicks in the last few years, he actually played one of his first gun-toting outlaws nearly three decades ago, when he appeared on the pastels-and-pistols TV drama Miami Vice.
In an episode titled “When Irish Eyes Are Crying” (Quick: What’s Gaelic for “Oooof”?), the then-34-year-old actor played an Irish activist pretending to be an awareness-raising pacifist (you can find a remarkably detailed synopsis of the episode on this Miami Vice wiki). Along the way, he falls for Det. Calabrese (Saundra Santiago), though their romance reaches a tragic climax that involves shoulder pads, staredowns, and a Patti LaBelle tune (you can watch the clip above).
According to the New York Post, Neeson got the part thanks to his friend Robert De Niro, who set the actor up with a Vice casting agent: “I flirted with her, she flirted with me,” Neeson told Jay Leno in 2012, explaining how he landed the role. Alas, it was a one-shot deal: As you can see in this extended (but poorly dubbed) version of the scene, Neeson’s character was shot by Crockett (Don Johnson) and fell several stories down to the pavement, where he was promptly not smushed by a marching band.
