There are stories an actor takes on, and then there are stories that take hold of an actor. For Liam Neeson, the Tuam mother and baby home scandal was the latter, and it left him so shaken that, for the first time in his career, he stepped behind the camera as a producer to make sure the world couldn’t look away from it.

The 74-year-old Irish star has now opened up about the moment everything changed for him: reading a 2017 New York Times investigation into St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. Written by Dan Barry, the piece drew on the painstaking research of local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered evidence that almost 800 infants and children had been buried in unmarked graves and a disused sewage tank on the grounds, victims of the Catholic nuns who ran the home from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Neeson, raised Catholic and once an altar boy, didn’t mince words about his reaction. Speaking to Variety nearly a decade after first reading the article, he described feeling “a growing rage, an embarrassment,” admitting he was “staggered” by what he learned. That anger crystallized into purpose. As he put it, it was the first time in his professional life he thought: whatever weight his celebrity carried in the industry, he wanted this story told to as many people as possible.

That resolve became THE LOST CHILDREN OF TUAM, with Neeson producing for the first time. He brought on director Frank Berry, the filmmaker behind MICHAEL INSIDE and AISHA, and cast Monica Dolan, 57, in the role of Catherine Corless. Neeson was deliberate about the tone he wanted, choosing a director who would let the story breathe rather than lean into shock, trusting that the horror of what happened would reveal itself without being forced.

THE LOST CHILDREN OF TUAM had its world premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh in July 2026 and went on to its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13. Irish audiences will get their first chance to see it in cinemas on September 25 through Volta Pictures, with a UK release following on October 9 via Picturehouse Entertainment.