10 Actors Who Took Movie Roles For Weird Reasons
2. Liam Neeson Wanted To Use His Own Accent - A Million Ways To Die In The West
Seth MacFarlane has worked with a lot of actors on multiple projects, including Liam Neeson. The Irish actor appeared on an episode of Family Guy in season 13, he made a cameo appearance in Ted, and the two are slated to work together on a reboot of The Naked Gun in the not-too-distant future.
Arguably the biggest project the two worked on together was A Million Ways to Die in the West. While Neeson only had a cameo in Ted, he played the chief antagonist of MacFarlane's big-screen directing debut, Clinch Leatherwood.
Though Clinch was a cowboy in 1882 Arizona, he spoke with Neeson's natural Irish accent, which was actually a non-negotiable demand from the actor before he agreed to the role. In season five of Family Guy, nine years before Neeson himself appeared on the show, there was a cutaway gag that essentially poked fun at how ridiculous he would be as a cowboy because of his accent.
As Neeson told Jimmy Fallon, when MacFarlane later asked him to take on the role of Clinch in his film, he agreed only on the condition that he could do it in his true accent as something of a callback to that very niche Family Guy joke.