In a separate conversation, Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen—Natasha’s longtime friend, who has known Richardson his entire life—also brought up the role.
“You watch her in The Parent Trap, and she’s kind of playing the perfect mother…That’s reminiscent of how she was as a mom,” he explained. “She was not a checked-out superstar. She was involved and engaged and wonderful and loving. I mean, I think of her every day. So I can’t imagine being her son and losing her. It’s heartbreaking to me still.”
Richardson, who was 13 at the time of his mother’s death, said, “I think the pain was a little too overwhelming. I think the mind is very powerful, and subconsciously, or unconsciously, it can protect you. That’s what it did when she passed. I just pushed it aside and didn’t want to deal with it.
“I don’t, even still, think that I’ve fully comprehended it, and that seems to be a similar journey to a lot of people I’ve spoken to,” added Richardson. “Fifty-year-olds who lost their parents when they were 12, 13…One day they’re out gardening, and something comes over them and they just break down.”
Richardson had long flirted with the idea of acting, taking part in theater groups and productions throughout middle and high school. But it wasn’t until he completed a fashion internship in London, shadowing tailors on Savile Row—and realizing, in the process, that fashion was not his calling—that he boomeranged back to acting. The vocation felt all the more meaningful considering his maternal bloodline.
“My great-aunt, Lynn Redgrave, was very into our ancestry. She traced our family back to these traveling actors in the 18th century. That’s really cool to be carrying that on,” said Richardson. But maintaining that legacy isn’t his only motivation: “Although we’re family, I’m very different from them, and I know I have something different to offer.”
Richardson’s cousin, the actor Daisy Bevan, agreed. “Micheál has a real sensitivity, and openness, and understanding of people,” she told me. “There’s something about Micheál—like some otherworldly threads to his tapestry. It’s something that people get very drawn to. He has a slight magic about him.”
Bevan, the daughter of Joely Richardson, said that she, Richardson, and Richardson’s younger brother spent much of their childhood “sort of in an imaginary world, playing games together when we were kids and creating make-believe.” Several years ago Bevan also decided to get into acting. “It’s so amazing to have someone I’m so close to who’s going through the exact same thing—coming from the family we do, and having that expectation and pressure, but wanting to carve your own path within it…It’s been so special for me to see him completely bloom and throw himself into these projects.”
But though Neeson was, and remains, supportive of his son’s ambition, the actor told Vanity Fair that he initially had real concerns.
“The acting profession is about many things, and one of those is rejection,” Neeson explained in an email. “If you get an audition and don’t get a recall and then don’t get the part and subsequently the job, it’s got nothing to do with your upbringing or what schools you attended; you’re rejected because of YOU; how you look, sound, the space you occupy as a human being. That is f’king tough. It’s especially tough when you have another audition in a couple more hours after being rejected after that first audition, i.e., you have to get your ‘mojo’ back up again. So one has to be sensitive in order to do the ‘work‘ and be able to hone that sensitivity, and yet one has to develop a ‘thick skin’ to not let the rejections wear you down: You have to desensitize. It’s crazy.”