Liam Neeson, who has had an impressive career upsurge from the Taken franchise, has said the end of kick-ass roles is in sight

His new film may be called Run All Night, but Liam Neeson knows there’s a limit to his energy – and has said he’s getting ready to call time on ass-kicking action roles.

Liam Neeson's special skills forces other ageing actors into training Read more

“Maybe two more years. If God spares me and I’m healthy,” he said in a US interview. “But after that, I’ll stop [the action] I think.”

Neeson, who originally broke through with dramas like Schindler’s List and Michael Collins, became known to a whole new generation of film fans with 2008 action hit Taken. Playing Bryan Mills, a man with an exceedingly quotable “particular set of skills” who fights to save his daughter from sex traffickers, the film and its two sequels have grossed nearly $900m worldwide.

Its success has prompted a number of other action roles for Neeson, in plane hijack thriller Non-Stop, the big-screen A-Team remake, improbable board game adaptation Battleship, and moody crime drama A Walk Among the Tombstones. Run All Night also treads similar ground to Taken, with Neeson on a mission to protect his son from a mobster played by Ed Harris.

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“I’m in a very, career-wise, great place,” Neeson said of the movies. “The success of certainly the Taken films, Hollywood seems to see me in a different light. I get sent quite a few action-oriented scripts, which is great. I’m not knocking it. It’s very flattering. But there is a limit, of course.”

He has alluded to hanging up his pistol before, saying around the release of Taken 3: “If I feel audiences saying, ‘Come on, he’s 62, enough is enough,’ I’m very sensitive to that and if I pick up that vibe it will all stop. And I’ll start playing dads or grandfathers. But I keep myself pretty fit and my knees are still great. And it’s fun.”

Joel Kinnaman, who plays Neeson’s son in Run All Night, said of the actor: “He’s so physically capable, he’s an old boxer. When he knocks somebody out in the movie, you believe it... Ed, Liam and Nick [Nolte]. They are people I’ve looked up to and revered their work. I think it’s kind of cool with all these old farts kicking ass, killing people.”

Taken’s success has also generated a slew of similarly bone-crunching roles for other “old farts kicking ass”, with Sean Penn in The Gunman, Pierce Brosnan in The November Man, and Kevin Costner in 3 Days to Kill.