Neeson’s makeup job had two looks: the exposed-muscle monster face, and a bandaged-wrapped face evocative of “The Invisible Man.” As one might assume, the bandaged face took less time to apply. In both cases, however, Neeson was getting up before dawn to train for “Crossing the Line,” aka “The Big Man,” a film that features a lot of glove-free fist fighting. As he explained to Collider in 2020, however, Neeson still recalls the time with fondness.
“I loved it. I remember being incredibly tired because there was make-up in the morning, especially when I was not wearing the bondages and you saw the scars and stuff. That started off as five hours in the make-up chair and we got it down to three. I was preparing to play a bare-knuckle boxer in a David Leland film (called ‘Crossing the Line’) to be shot in Scotland immediately after. I was setting an alarm clock for three in the morning, getting up and doing an hour’s work-out by myself, and then getting picked up in the dark to sit in the make-up chair for ‘Darkman’ and I just remember being really, really tired, but I did love it.”
“Darkman” came at a time when Neeson’s career was taking off in earnest, although he had been acting in feature films as early as 1978 (Neeson’s first film was an adaptation of the 17th century Christian text “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” wherein he played Christ) and had already starred in high-profile fantasy films like “Excalibur” and “Krull.” In the late 1980s, he appeared as a leather-wearing film director in the Dirty Harry film “The Dead Pool.” Only three short years and seven feature films after “Darkman,” Neeson would appear in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” cementing his popular reputation as an A-list actor.
