Smithers, British Columbia, is a long way from a movie star’s normal habitat in LA. nstead of a balmy 72 degrees, it’s often 40 below, with driving snow and thrashing 60-.p.h. winds. The It club is probably a moose-hunting lodge, and you can forget about finding a valet to park your snowmobile. It’s so cold there, Meg Ryan’s face would completely freeze. Sorry, bad example.
Into this winter not-so-wonderland came Liam Neeson, director Joe Carnahan and the cast of “The Grey.” The just-released survival thriller finds Neeson and a group of hardened oil workers struggling to survive in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash. And the elements aren’t the only enemy: The men are being stalked by a pack of hungry wolves.
“The Grey” is just the latest action role in recent years for the 59-year-old Neeson, including in “Batman Begins,” last year’s “Unknown,” and the surprise 2008 hit that transformed the aging Irish actor into a certified cinematic badass, “Taken.”
“I like doing that stuff,” Neeson tells The Post of physical roles. “I’ll keep doing it as long as my knees hold up. Another year, probably.”
Audiences are likely to join him on that journey. Neeson is that rare example of an actor whose roles get more physical as he gets older. He’s like an action-star Benjamin Button. Most leading men tackle the physical roles while they’re young, before branching out into more serious fare when they’re older. Neeson was nominated for a 1994 Oscar for “Schinder’s List,” and is now turning to action-y popcorn flicks.
Neeson has two things going for him that few others do, says Eric Lichtenfeld, author of “Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie.” He has a size (he’s 6-foot-4) and a steeliness that recalls another classic macho lead, Clint Eastwood.
Neeson is also a great actor.
“When you have a legitimate actor playing an action star, it helps us believe that these outlandish experiences are actually happening to someone,” Lichtenfeld says. “That’s how you get an audience emotionally engaged.”
The Irishman is also benefitting from the decades-old trend in which action heroes have changed from the buff, superhuman Rambo or Arnie types that dominated in the 1980s to more everyman heroes. Normal-guy Harrison Ford ruled the 1990s as Jack Ryan, and last year’s top-grossing action gods were a fey boy wizard, a pirate in dark eyeliner and, God help us all, Shia LaBeouf.
“There’s a wider range of what makes an action hero and what makes an action movie now than what there might have been 20 or 30 years ago,” Lichtenfeld says.
Take “The Grey,” for example. The lead character was originally going to be played by Bradley Cooper, the “Hangover” star who co-starred with Neeson in 2010’s movie version of “The A-Team.” When Cooper backed out, Carnahan turned to the much-older Neeson.
“When I read the script, I was 57 years old, and the little boy inside me thought it would be great to take on such a demanding role,” Neeson says. “I wanted audiences to say, ‘Wow, how did you guys do that?’ At the same time, I was thinking, ‘Jeez, can I physically do this?’ ”
He had no idea what awaited him.
The film was to be shot quickly over 39 days on a shoestring budget (for Hollywood, anyway) of $25 million. Despite the constraints, Carnahan wanted to film as much as possible on location in Smithers, a mountain town about 12 hours north of Vancouver. The scenery gave the film’s look a jolt of realism, but the extreme conditions also injected the actors’ performances with a little something extra.
“It became reacting as opposed to acting,” Carnahan says. “In one scene, I remember someone saying, ‘If we do another take, we run the risk of Liam getting the onset of frostbite.’ There was such a desperation [in his character’s performance] because there’s a desperation in that moment, because he wanted to keep warm.”
“The elements in general were pretty tough,” Neeson says. “There were a couple days that I got brain freeze. The function between the brain and the mouth to speak the words just wasn’t working. We were all fumbling over lines, and Joe got a bit antsy a couple times, thinking we hadn’t learned the lines. It was just hard to get that thought to make it work.”
The cold would occasionally freeze the hydraulic oil in the camera crane, rendering it useless. Carnahan got mild frostbite on his hands and toes, and his cast didn’t fare all that much better. There were no trailers on the remote set, so the actors huddled in shipping crates between takes. The production was shut down three times by whiteouts.
“You could only access the set by Sno-Cat or snowmobile,” Carnahan says. “Logistically, getting the gear up there was a challenge. You’d have an hour up the mountain every day to get to the set, two hours to break the gear. Then you’d have five hours of daylight before it would get dark. There was no ‘magic hour.’ It was more like ‘magic 3¹/₂ minutes,’ and then it was dark.”
“I remember I was wearing a balaclava for a couple days, and one of the technical guys said, ‘It’ll be warmer if you let your beard freeze,’” Carnahan recalls. “That sounded idiotic, but I finally did, and it looked like someone poured candle wax all over my face, and it was actually warmer. It insulated it.”
Neeson says he was willing to tolerate the uncomfortable filming conditions to tell an old-fashioned man-versus-nature story.
“I’ve seen so many movies which are driven by someone at a computer going, ‘Wow, look at this!’ ” he says. “In this movie, there’s not even a car. There’s one airplane, one gunshot.”
In the end, Carnahan says he’s glad he cast Neeson instead of someone younger. The character begins the film in a suicidal funk and exudes a world-weary, resigned quality that the director says only an older performer could pull off.
“Liam brought a depth of knowledge and a life lived and a guy who’s had all these experiences, good and bad,” he says of Neeson, whose wife, Natasha Richardson, died after a 2009 skiing accident. “A younger actor couldn’t conceive of their life as something they wouldn’t have use for. When you’re in your mid-30s and a movie star, you think, ‘Why the hell would I want to punch out of this, baby? I’m living it!’ ”
“Liam is nearly 60 and, as vibrant and strong and tough as he is, he understands how we’re all on the clock, every one of us,” he continues. “We’re all being stalked by time.”
Before time catches up with Neeson, he’s continuing to play the action star. He’s currently halfway through filming “Taken 2,” in which his retired CIA agent character is reportedly taken hostage in Turkey. The original was a reasonably engaging B-movie that was elevated by Neeson’s presence and went on to stun the industry by earning a whopping $145 million at the US box office.
Next month sees the re-release of 1999’s “Star Wars — Episode I: The Phantom Menace” in 3-D, in which Neeson managed to be one of the few nonlaughable things in the maligned prequel. In March, he returns as vengeful god Zeus in “Wrath of the Titans,” the sequel to “Clash of the Titans.” Is there another actor around who could deliver the ridiculous line “Release the Kraken!” with enough gravitas to keep audiences from bursting into laughter? He’s also rumored to be making a cameo in this summer’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” reprising the villainous Ra’s Al Ghul.
Beyond that, it’s
anyone’s guess. “Taken 3,” perhaps? Neeson chuckles and mimes picking up a phone and excitedly declaring, “How much?!”
“Let’s see what happens when you look outside and there’s a Brink’s truck backing up,” Carnahan jokes.
With the nice run the actor has had of late, chances are it’ll be more than enough to pay for multiple knee surgeries.