Bryan Mills

Bryan tries to get closer to his 17-year-old daughter Kim, and gives in when she asks to go to Paris with a friend. Soon after landing, both girls are kidnapped. On the phone he warns the kidnappers he will find and kill them unless they release Kim. With 96 hours to act before the trail goes cold, he flies to Paris, follows leads through a brothel and a safehouse, finds that Amanda has died and breaks up an auction. He saves Kim on a yacht. Before the trip, he saved the singer Sheerah from a knife attack at a concert, and she offered to have Kim's voice assessed. In Paris, ex-agent Jean-Claude guides him, but Bryan confronts him over his corruption to get the address of the buyer, Saint-Clair.

Bryan is in Istanbul on a job when Lenore and Kim turn up unannounced. The father of one of the men he killed in Paris, Murad Hoxha, wants revenge. Bryan is captured with Lenore, but he coaches Kim to help: she hides in the hotel, sets off grenades so he can find his bearings and guides him out by phone. They flee by taxi, and Bryan faces Murad in a Turkish bathhouse. He unloads the gun beforehand and kills him with a towel hook. He had just finished a three-day security job for a Saudi sheikh when the family showed up. During the escape he lures the pursuers' SUV into the path of a train.

Bryan finds Lenore dead in his apartment, becomes a suspect and escapes the Los Angeles police through the sewers. From a safehouse, he retraces her abduction, interrogates her husband Stuart and learns Lenore was killed over a debt and a life-insurance policy. He breaks into the penthouse of mobster Oleg Malankov, and when Stuart flees with Kim on a plane, Bryan rams the plane with a Porsche. At Kim's request he doesn't kill Stuart, and he is cleared. He interrogates Stuart by force, hears that the Russian mobster Oleg Malankov was the creditor and, later, that Stuart planned it all for a $12 million life-insurance policy.

Bryan Mills was conceived by Luc Besson and played by Liam Neeson after Jeff Bridges dropped out. In the NBC series (2017-2018), Clive Standen plays the character young, before the films.