Spoilers for this week’s episode of Atlanta follow! The hit FX comedy has had a wild time with its third season, delivering reality-based horror-tinged fables that act as episodes without the main cast, in addition to continuing the adventures of Earn, Paper Boi, Darius, and Van as they travel across Europe for a tour. This week took things down a trippy and scary road for Brian Tyree Henry’s Paper Boi as he wanders through the streets of Amsterdam while high on drugs. Across his journey he encounters some insufferable people and wild scenarios, but the biggest one for fans is the surprise celebrity cameo, Taken star Liam Neeson.
In the episode, Paper Boi realizes that Neeson is seated at the bar of the establishment he’s in, recognizing him instantly before noticing the name of the bar their in, Cancel Club. Neeson assumes Paper Boi is present because he’s been cancelled, and recounts his own real-life scandal. Back in 2019 the actor admitted that he stalked the streets looking for a black man, any black man, to take out vengeance on, following a friend who had been attacked and raped. The scene doesn’t make light of what Neeson did, but takes a big swing at biting satire with the fictional Neeson saying he still has a hatred for Black people because they “tried to ruin” his career. He follows it up by adding “I also learned the best and worst part of being white is, you never have to learn anything if you don’t want to,” a major theme of the show’s third season so far and commentary aimed more at Neeson and his contemporaries than those that supposedly do the “cancelling.”
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In any event, fans of the series were shocked to see Neeson appear, many praised it, many were perplexed by it, and some didn’t find it funny at all. See the reactions below.
