"Can I vroom vroom?" Pamela Anderson sits atop a motorcycle at Highline Stages in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, where, minutes earlier, she effor
“Can I vroom vroom?”
Pamela Anderson sits atop a motorcycle at Highline Stages in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where, minutes earlier, she effortlessly mounted the Bonneville T120 in her voluminous purple dress. Evoking classic Hollywood bombshells — think Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield over her Baywatch persona — she seems to be slipping into a character on this sunlit afternoon in mid-May, mock-revving the throttle as a production team figures out the best placement for a fan to blow her hair.
Several minutes later, Liam Neeson enters the stage decked out in black leather, ready to hop onto a bike of his own. But — pump the brakes — this is a cover shoot for their upcoming movie The Naked Gun, so in the grand tradition of the spoof-comedy franchise’s countless sight gags, the acting legend gets a petite vivid pink bicycle adorned with pink-and-silver handlebar fringe… and, of course, a dainty dinging bell.
The two are filling large shoes once occupied by Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley across three movies — 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, 1991’s The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, and 1994’s Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. Some 30 years after that third installment, Neeson plays Los Angeles Police Squad detective Frank Drebin Jr., son of the bumbling lieutenant made notable by Nielsen.
The gruff, no-nonsense Neeson (an Oscar nominee for Schindler’s List and star of the Taken and Star Wars franchises, among his 100-plus movie credits) isn’t an obvious choice to lead a comedy chock-full of puns, misunderstood questions, double entendres, shenanigans, and slapstick moments.
Producer Seth MacFarlane admits to Entertainment Weekly that the “wild idea” for Neeson to star in a reboot was his — and not because the actors’ names are so comically similar. No, MacFarlane’s inspiration struck after working with the Irish actor on Ted 2.
“Liam Neeson is probably the only actor alive in the 21st century who could do what Leslie Nielsen did, largely because that kind of actor is not something that we’re really generating a lot of in Hollywood anymore,” MacFarlane says, likening his star to Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and Charlton Heston. “[He’s] larger than life on screen and yet so honest, two things that don’t always mesh, but he’s really able to be that kind of an on-camera powerhouse.”
Being humorous, per se, isn’t actually what’s required of Neeson as Frank Drebin, the character created by brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams (collectively known as ZAZ) for the 1982 ABC comedy series Police Squad!, also starring Nielsen, which was canceled after just six episodes.
That’s not to say that Neeson isn’t humorous.
“He really is a silly guy,” Pamela Anderson tells EW of her costar a few weeks after the cover shoot, laughing. “He acts like a silly little boy sometimes.”
In addition to Ted 2 and other collaborations with MacFarlane (A Million Ways to Die in the West, The Orville, and a couple episodes of Family Guy), Neeson appeared on two episodes of the Northern Ireland-set comedy series Derry Girls, and — perhaps most notably — one episode of Life’s Too Short, created by and starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Warwick Davis.
“I’m a funny guy. Aren’t I?” he insists to the trio on a 2011 episode of the BBC- and HBO-produced series, playing himself. “I’m funny, right?”
Here, though, the jokes aren’t played for laughs but delivered with true earnestness.
“One of the cardinal rules for the Zucker brothers was that you don’t cast comedians,” MacFarlane explains. “You cast serious, dramatic actors, preferably with a ton of gravitas, which Liam has in bountiful levels.”
Liam Neeson for EW’s ‘The Naked Gun’ cover shoot.
Gavin Bond/Paramount
Neeson recalls taking an immediate liking to the idea of starring in a Naked Gun reboot.
“Not because I think I’m funny — far from it — but I did enjoy those Leslie Nielsen films a lot.”
He describes those movies as “a great giggle in the late ’80s, very early ’90s,” especially while going through a “rough period” in his life at that time while living in London. Still, he was a little reticent.
“I thought, Can I pull this off? The fact that it was Seth’s idea, I thought, Well, maybe he sees something in me.”
So did Paramount. This isn’t the first time someone has attempted to reboot the famed franchise. In December 2013, the studio announced that one led by The Hangover and Office star Ed Helms was in development, with Reno 911! creators Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant writing. In a 2015 interview, David Zucker said he was offered a producer role but declined; in 2017, he revealed that he and Pat Proft, a writer on the original Naked Gun trilogy, as well as the Scary Movie films that Zucker directed, were working on a script for the fourth Naked Gun.
Those, of course, ultimately went the way of so many ideas in Hollywood. But Paramount saw something in MacFarlane’s vision.
“The Liam-Seth combination, they got it immediately,” says MacFarlane’s producing partner, Erica Huggins. “I think that it is a tribute to all the executives that had seen all the iterations that had come before this, that this was the premier idea to try and reboot this particular franchise. It wasn’t a hard sell.”
Paul Walter Hauser, director Akiva Schaffer, and Liam Neeson on the set of ‘The Naked Gun’.
Frank Masi/Paramount
But Akiva Schaffer, one-third of the Emmy-winning Lonely Island comedy trio (along with Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone), admits there was “definitely trepidation” when Huggins started discussions with him to direct. He didn’t want to be the person to ruin it, after all.
“I would consider the first Naked Gun kind of a perfect movie,” he says during a break while working on the film’s sound mix at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. So perfect that his initial thought was that a reboot of the storied franchise was “a very bad idea.”
“The general rule is, if you’re going to pick up an old property, the better ones to do are ones that you’re switching the genre,” he explains, “like 21 Jump Street, where it was kind of a cheesy TV show drama and now you make it a comedy.”
But the next sentence, after asking if he wanted to make the movie, was “Liam Neeson is interested.”
That changed everything.
“No one can be Leslie Nielsen. And Liam Neeson is not Leslie Nielsen, but Liam is his own person with his own particular set of skills. So it just opened a world of possibility to me,” Schaffer recalls.
The write stuff
The original Naked Gun was inspired by 1950s and ’60s television — “M Squad, Dragnet, that kind of thing,” Schaffer says — as well as 1970s movie influences such as Charles Bronson’s Telefon, the Dirty Harry movies, and even 1973’s The Day of the Jackal. But in the 35 years since, “We have lots of new, fresh genre references in the world of detective procedural and action films and TV” to spoof, Schaffer notes. For example, the NCIS and Law & Order franchises, the world of John Wick, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the James Bond movies, and even Neeson’s own Taken and its sequels.
“There’s just endless things. So when I thought of it as Liam doing that — not trying to do what they did, but taking the spirit and trying to honor the style of those movies comedically without stealing outright as much as possible — that’s what opened it up,” Schaffer says. “And I started to see what the movie could be.”
A relief for MacFarlane. Prior to hiring Schaffer (who wrote the modern Naked Gun script with his Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers scribes Dan Gregor and Doug Mand), the producer had worked with a couple of other writers on his attempt to find the right way in.
“We had actually broken a story, but it really was feeling — even to us — like a cover band version of the original movie, and we couldn’t really justify in our own minds why this needed to be made,” MacFarlane admits. “Akiva and his team came up with a completely different take, and it just felt a lot fresher and a lot more worthy of shooting… He cracked the nut in a way we couldn’t.”
It helped that Schaffer “really studied” the first movie (“I watched it over and over to try to figure out the magic trick of it,” he says) — while also turning to others, including ZAZ’s Top Secret and Airplane!, Abrahams’ Hot Shots!, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, and Austin Powers. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight serves as a “vibe influence” for the opening set piece (a bank heist featuring Neeson in a schoolgirl uniform — more on that later), as well as “countless” detective movies, including Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep.
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In the spirit of the original movie, Schaffer’s film follows Frank Jr. as he and his partner, Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) — yep, son of George Kennedy’s famed sidekick — are investigating the death of tech programmer Simon Davenport, who drove his car off a Los Angeles mountain. Was it an accident? Did he take his own life? Was he killed? He worked for Edentech, and its owner, Richard Cane (Danny Huston), has nefarious intentions with his Project Inferno. Once implemented (via a “P.L.O.T. Device”), he can instantly flip the switch on humans’ brains, causing their behavior to revert to an animalistic fight-to-survive response.
Eddie Yu, Liam Neeson, and Paul Walter Hauser in ‘The Naked Gun’.
Frank Masi/Paramount
“I played into the archetype that I felt was required for this particular film and style, and relished that,” says Huston, who recently shared the screen with Neeson in the 2022 neo-noir crime-thriller Marlowe. Here, Huston confirms he was inspired by some real people for his character, “some of which I think I’ll keep to myself,” he adds with a smirk.
The actor also pulled from classic movies, including Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
“There’s something delightful about wanting to have ambitions on such a global scale, which turns it slightly political,” Huston says. “But it’s all very much with a good heart, I think. The whole film has a kind heart to it — however irreverent, occasionally, we want to be.”
Police aren’t the only ones curious about the circumstances around Simon’s death; so is his sister, Beth. Enter Anderson, who steps into the femme fatale role previously filled by Presley, whose character Jane Spencer eventually married Nielsen’s Frank Drebin and had a baby with him at the end of the third movie. (Neeson is not the grown version of that child; Frank Jr., though, was a passing mention at the end of Naked Gun 2 1/2, in a speech Frank delivers with President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush at his side.)
Pamela Anderson for EW’s ‘The Naked Gun’ cover shoot.
Gavin Bond/Paramount
“We were seeing lots of different people,” Schaffer says of casting Anderson as Beth. Finding the right leading woman was “really tricky,” he continues. Like Frank, they needed someone with dramatic chops who could play it straight but also clueless and “with charm and pizazz.”
Turning up the heat
After a handful of auditions (something Anderson has never done, as far as she can recall) and Zoom meetings with Schaffer, the recent Last Showgirl star won the role. (Schaffer says it came down to “two or three others by the end.”) But she also credits her chemistry with Neeson.
“I wanted to bring to the character some vulnerability and sincerity. It’s really easy to play way over the top, and it’s good to have some groundedness when there’s this comedy happening. So that was a challenge,” Anderson says. “You have to kind of jump off the deep end together. We’re going to be silly, but you also have to remain a true character. So it’s a dance.”
And, of course, it does take two to tango. Initially, Frank is closed off to the thought of love, but Beth opens his eyes and heart to modern possibilities. Like Frank with Beth, Neeson wasn’t sure what to expect from Anderson.
“She embraced and embodied the silliness, the quirkiness, and the intensity — and a little sad quality in her, too, which was adorable,” Neeson says of her take on the character. “She’s got that feistiness and innate sense of humor… And very easy on the eyes, too.”
Pamela Anderson in ‘The Naked Gun’.
Frank Masi/Paramount
Naked Gun is the next step in this modern era of Anderson’s unexpected career. She filmed the comedy before audiences ever saw The Last Showgirl, for which she earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations, as well as Rosebush Pruning with Elle Fanning, Riley Keough, and Callum Turner. (Since then, she’s also shot Place to Be opposite Ellen Burstyn, whom she calls “my hero.”)
This EW interview is the last thing on her itinerary before she jumps into rehearsals to play Marguerite in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real at this summer’s Williamstown Theatre Festival. After that production, she’ll shoot the Sally Potter film Alma in London with Dakota Fanning, and then Michael Cera’s feature directorial debut.
This, the 58-year-old says, is “not retirement,” as she thought she’d be living at this point in her life.
“I was a little bit disappointed in myself a few years back when I thought, I guess that’s all there is,” she admits. “I feel like I had so much more to give, but I really have never been an ambitious person and have always listened to what’s going on around me. But after I [played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway in 2022], I thought, Okay, from Baywatch to Broadway, I can live with that. I’ll go into my garden, I’ll make pickles and jams, and help my elderly parents, and that’s okay. This is still a beautiful life.”
As she did in Chicago, Anderson gets to show off her singing chops in Naked Gun — but swap the show tunes for jazz scat. As Beth becomes more involved in the search for her brother’s killer, she helps Frank infiltrate Cane’s club, distracting the tech billionaire with a number: Sassafras Chicken in D, she requests of the band, “and make it extra lumpy.”
As witness to the performance, Huston “was utterly spellbound” by Anderson.
“When she hit the stage with this jazz number, which was quite complicated and kind of mathematical, I was, yeah, smitten,” he admits.
Anderson, who was in her school’s jazz band, thinks her impromptu scat during one of her auditions is what helped her land the role.
“I did my eighth-grade scat for Akiva and he’s like, ‘Okay, you got the job,'” she recalls, with a laugh.
Adds Schaffer: “I think that might be true.”
Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in ‘The Naked Gun’.
Paramount Pictures
Prepping for her large Naked Gun moment, though, was daunting.
“I was like, How am I going to remember this? It’s an absolutely nutty scat solo. But I did, and I sing it all the time, just walking around the house. I can’t get it out of my head.”
She also had to confront nerves about working with her legendary costar, whom she was “terrified” to meet. He squashed her fears, though, on their first day of rehearsal.
“It’s like walking on stage, the butterflies you get. Once you’re on stage, then you feel safe and you feel free,” she says. “But it’s the anticipation of meeting somebody, isn’t it? It’s the hardest part.”
Neeson has previously declared himself to be “madly in love with her” (though, seemingly platonic, as he also declared himself done with dating), and she previously told EW their relationship stayed “professionally romantic” during filming, where she says she “learned so much from him.”
“I think I have a friend forever in Liam, and we definitely have a connection that is very sincere, very loving, and he’s a good guy,” she says, adding her admiration for his body of work. “He’s a true artist. He comes from theater and Schindler’s List and has done over a hundred films. And I did things inside out and backwards, came from television, and then my personal life kind of overshadowed my professional life. It is funny: We all come to this place in different ways, but to be able to share this experience with him is very meaningful and such an honor.”
Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson for EW’s ‘The Naked Gun’ cover shoot.
Gavin Bond/Paramount
An experience that, for all of his acting expertise, had Neeson questioning his craft.
“He was acting really humble and nervous to do comedy,” Hauser recalls. “We all knew he could do it, but he kept just being like, ‘I really hope I’m doing this right.'”
Taken the humorous road
Despite popping in on a couple of comedy series, even hosting Saturday Night Live in 2004 (just before the Lonely Island started working there, in 2005), Neeson knew an 85-minute movie was a “different ballgame” than a compact TV appearance.
“During the whole shoot — I’m being very honest — I still did not know, when we wrapped at the end of each working day, whether it was working for me. Pamela, Paul, Danny, everybody else, I thought, were very funny. I just couldn’t put a verdict on myself, on my own performance. I’d always ask Akiva, ‘Are you sure it’s working?’ That continued from day one till we finished.”
Not only was it working, but he was contributing in significant ways to some of the movie’s most hilarious gags. Case in point: the teaser trailer that made a splash in early April, featuring Neeson in a schoolgirl uniform. Behind the scenes, Schaffer recalls people wondering if Neeson would don the outfit. Neeson, he said, “insisted” on wearing it.
Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) flashes his strawberry underpants in ‘The Naked Gun’.
Paramount Pictures
“The things you might think were more difficult to talk him into were the things he was leaning into. He was fully ready to get the silliness in.”
And, as Neeson recalls, it was his suggestion “that the skirt should be a little bit shorter” — funnier, he thought, if his underwear had an unexpected design on it.
“My schoolgirl underpants, they’re strawberries,” he says proudly.
If that bank-robbery fight scene performed in a tiny skirt wasn’t enough, the cherry on top was the teaser’s final joke. In the police department’s Hall of Legends, the crying men kneel before photos of those who came before, some of whom are their fathers. The last image is of Detective Nordberg, played in the first three movies by O.J. Simpson. The officer we see looking at his photo is not crying, however, and is quick to shake his head, confirming Nordberg is not his dad (nor, seemingly, will this movie pay any kind of tribute to the delayed football star turned actor acquitted of double homicide).
“The first time I would tell any friend, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of writing this thing,’ they go, ‘What are you going to do about O.J.?’ So we had to answer the O.J. question,” Schaffer explains of that quick nod.
“It tickled a lot of funny bones,” Neeson says of the trailer. “I wasn’t interested in hearing numbers and blah blah blah — I’m just not on any social media sites or anything like that — but I got the sense… My wonderful PR lady said, ‘This has played really, really well.'”
Danny Huston and Liam Neeson in ‘The Naked Gun’.
Paramount Pictures
So well that Hauser got a “surprising amount” of text messages, phone calls, and emails from people reacting to the first look.
“There was a really weird emotional reaction people were having because of how those films fit into their childhood…. Clearly, there’s a desire for this.”
MacFarlane, for one, is encouraged by the positive response.
“The environment that we’re living in, I think, certainly helps. It’s been a long time since a really high-profile hard comedy has been put out there,” he says. “This is a true comedy, with a whole bunch of laughs. And I think that’s something that’s a little rare right now. And hopefully, if the movie does well, it brings a few more of those kinds of movies back into our shared landscape.”
Like, perhaps, a sequel? Anderson is ready to carry on the tradition of the original trilogy, which proved to be quite lucrative for the time. (Each movie opened at No. 1 and, combined, earned almost $217 million at the domestic box office.)
“I’ve already told them I want to do it,” she says without hesitation. “Liam said he’ll do it if I do it. People have to love it, though.”
Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson for EW’s ‘The Naked Gun’ cover shoot.
Gavin Bond/Paramount
Like another scene for this cover shoot, the two can’t seem to escape each other.
“This brings back memories, Pamela,” Neeson tells her as the production team ties them up in rope.
“Just imagine, this could be you and Paul Walter Hauser,” she replies.
Next time.
—————————–
Directed by Kristen Harding + Alison Wild
Photography by Gavin Bond
Motion – DP: Michael Smiy; Camera Op: Phil Fletcher; 1st AC: Bill Bogota, Nicolas Filmore; Gaffer: Marcus Roy; Best Electric: Karl Schroder; 3rd Electric: Chris Bucior; 4th Electric: CJ Yurnet; 5th Electric: Marcus S. Ray; Key Grip: Marc Eckhardt; Best Grip: Nick Ellison; 3rd Grip: Brandon Barron; 4th Grip: Donovan Lambert; DIT: Dennis Imagine
Production Design – Production Designer: Lana Boy Ferron; Art Director: Lucas Godlewski; Set Decorator: Izabela Zolek; Set Dresser: Jack DeSousa; Props Master: Peggy Yee; PA: Alec Hawkins
Production – Producer: Austin Sepulveda; Production Manager: Maxwell Gately; Production Coordinator: Tim McBride; 1st AD: Marcus Sigliano; 2nd AD: Joy Grant
Post-Production – Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; Design: Alice Morgan; Score: Lorne Balfe; Sound Design: Kristen Harding
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