Neeson’s brutally honest cameo in Donald Glover’s subversive comedy Atlanta marks the end of a near-perfect celebrity apology tour

Cancel culture has just received a punch in the face from cinema’s greatest action dad. Liam Neeson, star of Taken and other popular beat ’em ups, seemed to have burned his career to the ground with an ill-advised and troubling anecdote about a revenge fantasy against a “black bastard” in 2019.

But now Neeson (69) has turned up in surreal comedy Atlanta parodying himself and making some pithy comments about how the rules are different for privileged white film stars such as he.

Atlanta is the auteur-esque project of actor and musician Donald Glover and one of the most subversive and racially astute shows on TV (for proof rewind to the season one episode featuring “Black Justin Bieber”).

But Neeson’s cameo takes it to another level of mind-bending self-awareness. Neeson materialises in a hallucinatory bar dubbed “the Cancel Club” and delivers a frank apology for his ill-chosen remarks of three years ago. He doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as drive a snow-plough through it (as he does in Cold Pursuit, the action flick that prompted his mind-bending revenge diatribe).

“You might have read about my transgression,” he tells rapper “Paper Boi” (Brian Tyree Henry), who has been tripping his head off in Amsterdam after eating a “Tibetan Space Cake”.

“What I said what I wanted to do to a black guy…  A friend of mine had been raped. I acted out of anger. I look back now and it honestly frightened me. I thought people, knowing who I once was, [that it would] would make clear who I am, who I’ve become. But, with all that being said… I am sorry. I apologise if I hurt people.”

It’s a frank mea culpa from an actor who, three years ago, appeared not to understand that there is no situation in which you can use the words “black bastard” without causing offence. That it’s delivered on a show whose audience can comfortably be described as “woke” makes it all the more powerful.

Neeson has gone beyond the fake, publicist-drafted apologies standard when a celeb plants their foot in it. While he did say “sorry” the incident has also seemingly led to real soul-searching and growth. And on Atlanta he was prepared to hold his hands up.

And to then make an astute point about privilege. “The best and worst part of being white,” he tells Paper Boi, “is you don’t have to learn anything if you don’t want to.”

Neeson’s career was never in serious jeopardy though the controversy did put Cold Pursuit in deep freeze, with the LA premiere hastily cancelled in the aftermath of his interview with The Independent.

But he has kept his head down and crucially not made any further ill-advised comments (there was a surreal dad joke he cracked on Australian TV when he said he had once fallen in love while shooting a movie Down Under – but that the object of his affection had been “taken”).

He’s also got on with the job of being a gruff popcorn icon. Last year he appeared Ice Road – his second cold-themed action feature after Cold Pursuit – while in 2022 he is set to play Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe anti-hero Philip Marlowe in Neil Jordan’s Marlowe.

Plus he’s poked fun at the Neeson brand. He was hilarious in his recent Derry Girls cameo as a craggy RUC officer – a genuine bolt from nowhere, which provoked no howls of protest from Twitter.

And with Atlanta he has demonstrated a willingness to admit to his mistakes – with a degree of honesty beyond most image-obsessed movie stars (candour and lack of cynical worldiness being what got him in trouble in the first place).

Perhaps the most jarring line in his Atlanta cameo is when Neeson tells Henry’s character that he “can’t stand” black people because “they tried to ruin my career”. Which isn’t strictly true, of course.

This willingness to take his blows and to then work at self-betterment is an anomaly in Hollywood, where the goal is to impose your narrative on the social media cycle. Neeson wasn’t having any of that.

He instead allowed the dust to settle and has now gone on one of the smartest shows on TV – and that rare comedy to offer an authentic Africa-American perspective – and allowed himself be ridiculed. To quote his favourite Taken line – he has a “particular set of skills”. And cancelling his own cancellation may one of them.