Liam Neeson to welcome New Yorkers back to cinemas: ‘This is one for the diary’

New York cinemas will open this weekend after nearly a year of being closed due to the coronavirus pandemic – and Liam Neeson will be out and about to celebrate it.

The Marksman star, who has received his first vaccination shot, will personally thank moviegoers for attending his latest action film.

“This is one for the diary,” Neeson told The Hollywood Reporter. “It will be nice to welcome people. I think going to the cinema is a bit of a sacred experience. I’ve felt that way since I was a kid.”

Tom Ortenberg, chief of Open Road/Briarcliff, which is distributing The Marksman in the US, added: “The reopening of New York is a strong symbolic gesture to the theater-going audience that it is okay to put your toe in the water.”

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Neeson is reportedly likely to talk to filmgoers about the famed acting duo Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson – the grandparents of his late wife, Natasha Richardson – who starred in plays in London’s West End during the blitz in the Second World War.

“People didn’t panic,” he told THR. “Sometimes, the plays would stop and Sir Michael would go down to the orchestra pit and start playing the piano and do singalongs. Vanessa Redgrave, who was my wife’s mum, would tell us that story over the years and I’d think, ‘Wow, that’s extraordinary.’”

Neeson added: “There is a tiny parallel to what’s happening now. We are being bombarded by these microscopic invisible bombs.”