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The Naked Gun star Liam Neeson shares the trick he and his co-star used to not laugh on the set, no matter how silly things got
Every line in a Naked Gun movie is strategically designed to be incredibly dumb and incredibly funny
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The original Naked Gun movies are dumb, but they’re also incredibly smart about how dumb they are. The comedy comes from how seriously everyone takes everything that happens, which is why Liam Neeson being cast as the lead in The Naked Gun remake actually makes a lot of sense. The Oscar-nominated actor brought his usual intensity to the role, but he had a surprisingly simple trick to keep himself from breaking character during all the ridiculous dialogue that was being thrown at him.
During an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote The Naked Gun, Liam Neeson explained how he kept himself from laughing at the dialogue in the film. “It’s not really a trick,” he admitted. “Some of the cast, Danny Huston, who’s the ‘bad guy…’ this is our fourth movie together, you know? So we’re pals. So to stop ourselves [from] laughing, we would, instead of looking into each other’s eyes during a scene, we’d look at the forehead.”
See? We told you it was a simple trick. And it seems to have worked because even the trailer for The Naked Gun sold us on the film’s dedication to the tone of the original films. Which is, of course, making a very dumb movie that is also incredibly funny. And if it means Liam Neeson had to stare deeply into Pamela Anderson’s forehead to make it happen, so be it.
The Naked Gun is out now in cinemas and stars Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, CCH Pounder, and Danny Huston.
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