An Ode to Sam Neill
I’m interrupting my normal schedule of...not publishing this newsletter to write about one of my favorite actors, Sam Neill, who died last night at the age of 78.
Like most people, I first came to know Sam Neill from his role in Jurassic Park (1993). That was a massive film for me—my first PG-13 movie at the impressionable age of six—and there, at the center of it, was the curmudgeonly-but-affable paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant.
It’s worth considering what an odd leading role Grant is. 50% of the character is a carbon copy of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones: a rugged yet intellectual hero dragged unwillingly into peril that he overcomes with brains and brawn. But the thing about Sam Neill is that he’s not a conventional leading man. He’s just a bit too soft, just a bit too unwilling to go along for the adventure. He has an everyman quality that shines through in all his roles but paradoxically prevented him from fitting into the mold of traditional Hollywood stardom.
Relatability was Sam Neill’s greatest strength. When Alan Grant tells you it’s a bad idea to build a dinosaur theme park, you believe him. When he runs from the T-Rex, you imagine yourself running from the T-Rex. Alan Grant hates kids, not in the way that Indiana Jones hates snakes, but in the way that some actual humans just don’t like kids! Jurassic Park only works because Stephen Spielberg found the most affable and relatable guy and plopped him down in the center of it.
After Jurassic Park, six-year-old me was convinced that Sam Neill was the most famous actor on earth. I had no idea the man was up to that point a relative unknown from the Australian/New Zealand theater and film scene—I didn’t even realize he wasn’t American. As the years rolled on and Sam Neill-led blockbusters failed to materialize in theaters every summer, he began to feel like a secret only I was in on. He was the first actor I felt was one of my guys.
In reality, Sam Neill was never truly an unknown. While he was never quite a household name, he worked consistently and prolifically across screen and stage for over fifty years. If you’ve never seen his pre-Hollywood roles, I encourage you to look up Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm (1989), a psychological thriller about a sailing couple (Neill and Nicole Kidman) who rescue a stranger from a sinking ship only to discover he’s not what he seems.
Sam Neill’s pre-Jurassic Park U.S. breakout came with 1990’s the Hunt for Red October as Vasily, Sean Connery’s dutiful second-in-command. Once again, he brings an everyman’s charm and pathos to the role, perfectly encapsulated in a small monologue where he imagines what life will be like once they defect to the West. He speaks of buying a “Recreational Vehicle” and traveling the country with his “round wife” while raising rabbits, all delivered with an infectious boyish smile. It’s wonderful.
Years later I would learn that he almost had a much bigger breakout role. Following Roger Moore’s retirement as James Bond, Sam Neill auditioned for the role in 1986 and got as far as a screen test before losing out to Timothy Dalton. While I’d love to believe there’s a universe out there where Sam Neill had a successful run as 007, you can watch the footage yourself and see that it doesn’t really work. Once again, his relatable charm sabotaged his ability to package himself as an A-list star.
Special mention must be given to Sam Neill’s 1990s horror oeuvre. Following up Jurassic Park with a lead role in a late-period John Carpenter horror film might not have been the best career decision, but there’s a reason 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness is now considered a cult masterpiece. In it, Neill plays an insurance investigator looking into the disappearance of a Stephen King-coded author whose latest book is rumored to drive readers insane. It blends Lovecraftian horror with dry social satire about the contemporary issue of violence in media through the story of a relatable man watching all of society lose its mind around him. The final scene of the movie is Sam Neill sitting alone in a theater, watching the film along with us and laughing. It’s one of the greatest endings ever.
Several years later, he’d follow that performance up with a supporting turn in 1997’s Event Horizon, a sci-fi horror film about a salvage crew exploring a derelict spaceship recently returned from a trip through a wormhole—and, apparently, a quick pitstop in hell. Growing up, this was the single scariest movie any kid on the playground had ever heard of. We’d stand around and listen to the one kid whose parents were negligent enough to let him watch it recount scenes to us and then later have nightmares about what we thought was in the movie. I was so scared of it that it took me until three years ago to actually watch it. It turns out it rocks! Sam Neill gets to tap into his dark side, playing the crew member who succumbs to the evil presence on the ship and turns on his shipmates. It’s a role reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in the Shining, but if it were directed by a ‘90s splattercore director.
His reprisal of the Alan Grant role in 2001’s Jurassic Park III—a film maligned at the time, though I maintain it’s a lot of fun and leagues better than the World films—was his last major foray into big-screen leading man territory. He continued to appear frequently in film and TV, and I continued to be delighted when he’d pop up, but that happened less and less as the 2000s rolled on.
The 2010s introduced an unexpected second act to Sam Neill’s career: minor social media star. You see: back in the ‘90s, the man had bought himself a farm and vineyard in New Zealand and it had apparently grown to become his life’s passion. For some reason, he decided to join Twitter—this was back when it was still good and not yet the place where all the Nazis hang out—and post frequent updates about the farm and its many adorable animals. To be clear, this wasn’t “annoying celebrity influencer” style posting; this was “your uncle who lives on a farm discovered how to post and is remarkably good at it”. If you followed him, he’d immediately follow you back. Being Sam Neill’s Twitter mutual for a few years in the mid-2010s was one of the highest honors of my lifetime.
It was in this New Zealand farmer period that he shot his 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a Taika Waititi-helmed adventure comedy about a curmudgeonly woodsman forced to shepherd a troubled foster child through the New Zealand bush. Sam Neill perfectly balances “guy who really doesn’t want to be here right now” with “guy you’d really like a hug from.” It’s a delightful movie. Please look it up.
I try to have no illusions about really knowing celebrities, but everything I’ve read about Sam indicates that he was a consummate professional and fundamentally decent man. We were lucky to have him while we did.