This is a really lovely beginning to a celebrity profile. Perhaps one of the loveliest we’ve read yet. From Tom Chiarella in Esquire "The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson" (via Longreads)

Liam Neeson and I last spoke a week before I wrote this sentence. At that time, I asked him what he remembered about the interview I’d done with him at a restaurant in New York almost three weeks before that. He said, “I remember you told me that story about your accident, and that was pretty hard for you. I remember that you made me draw that picture of my house, and I remember that we talked about Natasha. I started to worry: Why would I tell him that? Why did I speak about the hospital? And then I thought, No, he’s a man. This is not some newspaper story. So I wasn’t sorry. Except about your accident. That was bloody awful.”

Then Liam Neeson asked me what I remembered about the interview. I echoed him: “You told me about your accident. You told me about your wife’s accident. That was hard for you. You were upset. You got very quiet. So I traded stories. I told you something bad that happened to me. I have the picture of your house right here. I remember that your hand was shaking.”

“You have to be careful,” he told me, “in how you describe it.” I told him that was my job, to be careful with descriptions.