Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson are a bit dazed.thay’ve just turned the lights on in the screening room on the third floor of the Paramount Building in Midtown Manhattan,where they sat next to each other in an otherwise empty room,watching their sequel to the slapstick 1980s and 90s comedy series The Naked gun for the first time.
‘I’m thinking, “My head is too big. She’s gorgeous. The side of my face!”‘ Neeson frets after sitting down in a small room behind the screening room, with windows looking down on the Broadway Theater District.
‘It’s tough to watch yourself. You take yourself apart. I hardly even look in the mirror,’ says Anderson, sitting a few inches from Neeson in a matching chair.
‘I’ve made 106 movies, believe it or not,’ he says.’But your seeing yourself 20ft high.’
‘It’s not normal,’ she adds.
Anderson, 58, has a curled blonde bob, her fringe pushed away from her face.Edging away from the make-up-free look she has rocked for the past few years, she’s wearing a little blush and light-coloured lip gloss.She is dressed in black trousers,a black jumper and open-toed black shoes,and she leans over the arm of the chair to look up at Neeson,catlike.
Liam wears: suit, dolce & Gabbana. Shirt,Armani. Pamela wears: dress,Nina Ricci
Neeson,73,his glasses perched on his forehead,is in gray trackpants,a black puffer jacket worn over a T-shirt with a drawing of a tree on it,and black Kizik trainers. He is eating the foil-wrapped remains of a Tony’s Chocolonely bar that he stores in the upside-down trucker cap he’s put on the table in front of them. His Irish voice is so slow and gravelly, like an anti-leprechaun, that he is sometimes impossible to here.When I ask Anderson if he’s different than she expected before they met for the first time on set, Neeson glares threateningly at her and mimes pumping a shotgun with one hand, as if he’s done the action hundreds of times before. Which he has.
liam says he loved shooting the ‘sex scenes’ the best
They are an unlikely pair. he is a 6ft 4in actor who learned to box during the Troubles, as a Catholic growing up in Northern Ireland.She is a shy, 5ft 7in, small-town Canadian vegan who was discovered on a video screen at a football game in 1989. Until The Naked Gun director Akiva Schaffer (SaturdayAnderson and Neeson, oddly, don’t seem an unlikely pair in real life. They both have new puppies and they both garden – he at home in Upstate New York and she on her seven-acre estate on Vancouver island, which once belonged to her grandmother. They both read at night before going to bed early, and neither likes to carry their phones, especially on set; Anderson doesn’t even have any apps on hers because she found she wasted hours on them. They both have grown-up children who have flown the nest, and no grandkids yet. He occasionally puts his hand on her shoulder or knee, and she playfully slaps his arm when he makes jokes, at which she invariably giggles. During shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, she dropped off homemade sourdough bread and muffins with notes in his trailer. ‘I was testing my cookbook recipes on Liam,’ Anderson says, referring to her 2024 vegan cookbook, I Love You: Recipes From The Heart. ‘I made him a birthday cake – my rose olive-oil cake.’
‘Casting Pamela was a no-brainer. She was real. She was funny.And incredibly sexy’
Although Anderson was physically shaking from nerves on her first day, she says it didn’t take her long to get cozy. When I ask them what their favorite part of shooting the film was,Neeson says,’the sex scenes’ – for which they had an intimacy coordinator. ‘I’d never had one before. But she was in the background.There was no kind of, “OK! Excuse me!”’ Neeson says.
‘She knew when to walk away,’ Anderson jokes. Imitating an intimacy coordinator throwing up her hands and storming off, she adds, ‘I can’t take this!’
‘She said, “This is too hot for me. I’m going for coffee,”‘ Neeson adds.
Even their careers aren’t as far apart awidth=”306″ alt=”” class=”blkBorder img-share” style=”max-width:100%” loading=”lazy” />