It’s always fascinating to learn how actors choose their roles. In his autobiography, for instance, Bryan Cranston laid out an elaborate calculation where he grades each potential movie on the quality of its story, text, role, director and cast. Meanwhile, less mathematically, Bob Hoskins utilised what he referred to as the “cold bum test”: he read his scripts on the toilet and, if he kept reading one for so long that his bum got cold, that was a sign that he should accept the part.
And then we have Liam Neeson. Now that his career has seemingly fully recovered from that weird interview in which he said he once walked the streets looking for a black man to murder, he is promoting his movies in the normal manner again. And, during an interview to promote his new crime thriller Marlowe, Neeson happened to reveal how he picks his movies.
Obviously, had this question been asked of him a decade ago his criteria would have probably been: “Is it so completely identical to the first Taken film that nobody will be able to tell the difference?” But Neeson is a little older now, and he has started to make movies that don’t simply rely on his ability to sigh and punch people. Instead, he told Yahoo, he uses a simple trick known as the “cup of tea test”.
“If my agent sends me a script, and I get to page five and I think [distractedly] ‘Oh, I must make some tea,’ that’s not a good sign,” Neeson said. On the other hand, if he can read a script from start to finish and only think about making a cup of tea at the end, then that is a good sign.
We can discern two key pieces of information here. The first is that Liam Neeson likes to put himself in the place of the audience when reading a script. If the movie cannot hold his attention, there is no chance that it will keep the attention of the average punter on the street. This is solid, popular, gut-instinct decision-making from a man with far more experience than most.
The other key piece of information is this: Jesus Christ, Liam Neeson is obsessed with tea. Like, he is fully obsessed. Tea haunts Liam Neeson’s every waking moment. The man is so monomaniacal about cups of tea that you sense he only reads scripts in the first place in a doomed bid to temporarily banish all thought of them from his mind.
By Liam Neeson’s standards, then even after finishing a good script – even after finishing the greatest script ever written – his first thought won’t be a critical assessment of the workload it requires of him, but gratuitous relief that he finally gets to devote more of his time to thinking about tea again.
Listen, maybe I’m wrong here. Maybe, as someone who can often go several hours at a time without thinking a single thought about tea, I’m the weirdo. Maybe I’m in the minority, and everyone else is so fixated on tea that they can’t even read five pages of a screenplay without peeling away, lost in a deep and wonderful reverie about all the different cups of tea they’d like to drink. If that’s the case, I apologise.
But I don’t think that is the case. I don’t think anyone on Earth loves tea as much as Liam Neeson loves tea. Liam Neeson’s enjoyment of tea seems to go beyond the normal human tea parameters. He seems like he’s addicted. It’s worrying.
Still, if the cup of tea test works for Liam Neeson, then it works. He has built a fine filmography over the years on this criterion. What’s more, this also acts as a handy lesson for budding feature writers. If you want Liam Neeson to be in your film, absolutely under no circumstances should your script mention tea. As soon as it does, Liam Neeson will drop the script to the floor and walk to the kitchen in a fugue state to fill a bath of tea and sit in it, and your masterpiece will be lost to the world for ever.
