Acting Up – Episode #40: Michéal Richardson
Welcome to ACTING UP, the place where we celebrate standout performances in TV, streaming and film. Other than spotlighting exceptional work from recent projects, this feature also shines a light on how certain actors got where they are today. Have a peek and then check out these notable performances to help hone your craft.
The Snapshot: Michéal Richardson plays an estranged son trying to mend fences with his artist father while rebuilding their family’s Tuscan villa in the heartwarming drama, Made in Italy. (Available on VOD platforms as of August 7th.)
The Performer: Michéal Richardson
The Film: Made in Italy
The Performance:
How well a film comes off can usually be chalked up to the moment of its release. On that front, Made in Italy might as well be Citizen Kane. At a time when there’s a collective cricket sound in the Hollywood new-release department, a heartwarming, funny (at times) film that celebrates the beauty of Italian culture stands out in a way it might otherwise wouldn’t.
Made in Italy is why movies get made – to laugh, to cry, to escape to the beauty of a faraway place. It’s also a deeply personal story that serves as a coming-out party for the film’s lead actor, Michéal Richardson (son of Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson), who plays Jack. As a troubled, soon-to-be-divorced London art gallery operator, Jack is a lost soul searching for answers in his past while still grieving the death of his mother from when he was a child.
It’s a bit of an art-imitates-life performance for Richardson, who lost his mother Natasha in a tragic ski accident back in 2009 when he was 13 years old. And given his screen father is played by real-life father Neeson, this cathartic coupling no doubt serves as a therapeutic family affair.
Falling somewhere between Hugh Grant and Timothée Chalamet on the depth chart, Richardson’s Jack is first introduced with his life in crisis, trying to buy the art gallery he runs from his ex-wife in New York City. The only way to get the money to accomplish this? To sell the Tuscan villa he co-owns with his father Robert (Neeson), an artist and bit of a philanderer.
Sounds lovely, except the home is in, well, disrepair. Its current state is best described by the English real-estate agent (Lindsay Duncan):
“If I was to bring them to this house in this state, they would say to me ‘Kate, you promised me a dream. A dream orchestrated by Puccini in which my worries would float off into the infinity pool. Instead, you’ve delivered me a building site whose walls seemed to have been painted by Mussolini.”
It’s through the journey of rebuilding that father and son try to resurrect not just their dilapidated country home, but their relationship. Richardson shines in these moments, as painful as they may be to play, shuttling adeptly between charismatic and understandable resentment as a boy who feels abandoned by a father who went unmistakably absent during his formative years.
To that end, there’s a scene where he and Neeson trade shots as a grieving father and son inside the villa that once brought them both happiness in the not-so-recent past. It’s powerful as they both reminisce about the moment they lost their mother and wife respectively. If this scene doesn’t stir up a strong case of the feels, you might want to down your Prozac intake just a smidge.
Combine these emotional performances with picturesque scenes of Jack wandering hill towns of Tuscany, dining at outdoor cafes and stirring up romance with an equally troubled Italian woman and Made in Italy might just be the most enjoyable trip you’re going to take to Italy anytime soon.
The Career:
Admittedly, it helps to have a strong lineage in Hollywood. In a business where it’s all ‘who you know,’ having Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson as parents along with Oscar-winners Vanessa Redgrave and filmmaker Tony Richardson as grandparents can only help the pursuit.
But that’s where we can put the nepotistic angle to bed on this one. Sometimes the talent is also a perfect fit for the role, and that’s exactly what happened with this one when father Liam showed up at Michéal’s door with the Made in Italy script in hand, according to a Vanity Fair piece. The script came from first-time writer/director James D’Arcy, a TV/film actor himself, and as Richardson puts it in the article, “It felt like my mom, in a spiritual sense, had a hand in it.”
Cut to before Made in Italy, when the 25-year-old Dublin-born actor (who changed his name from “Neeson” to “Richardson” in 2018 to honor his late mother) began refining his craft at Lee Strasberg Film and Theatre Institute. That combined with the many readings he’s had with father Liam over the years, has helped Michéal blossom as an artist… and one who can do accents.
As for previous work, Richardson got his first off-Broadway theater role in fall 2019 in Gold Can Stay, a love story from the opioid era. Prior to that, he landed small roles in film projects such as Cold Pursuit (2019) again with dad and Vox Lux (2018) – not to mention, the Amazon Prime series Big Dogs (2020), a dystopian thriller about a darker, alternate reality for New York City.
Prior to COVID, there were a few other notable projects in the works for the young actor including The Rising: 1916, where Richardson plays the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, a role his father actually received a Golden Globe nod for back in 1997.
Then there’s the online film series On Our Way, where Micheál will appear in an episode (Entrée Des Artistes) alongside other thespians from his family, namely Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero and Daisy Bevan.
Only time will tell what it all leads to for this talented up-and-comer, but based on his performance in Made in Italy, here’s one writer betting on a legacy of his own making.
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Acting Up: Joel Kim Booster
Acting Up – Episode #21: ‘Hunters’ Actor Logan Lerman
ACTING UP – Episode #11: Sosie Bacon & Chris O’Dowd
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Gregg Rosenzweig has been a writer, creative director and managing editor for various entertainment clients, ad agencies and digital media companies over the past 20 years. He is also a partner in the talent management/production company, The Rosenzweig Group.
