How Sir Sam Neill is spending summer at home on his Central Otago farm

Sam Neill as Stan in season one of Apples Never Fall. Photo / Getty Images

By RNZ

A cup of Irish breakfast tea is the first thing Sir Sam Neill reaches for in the morning.

A little while later it’s time for the 77-year-old actor and winemaker to make a coffee run in his old car before getting into the garden.

At home on his Central Otago farm this summer, Sir Sam tells Summer Times he is feeling healthy after enduring what he calls some “cancer stuff” in recent years.

“I’m doing my exercises - well, not as many as I probably should be. I’m a little bit lazy in that regard. But now I feel good and optimistic and and looking forward to a long future.

“One of the things that these issues teach you is life is short so make the most of it and that’s what I’m doing.”

By world standards, Aotearoa seems like “an oasis of calm and reason”, Neill says, although our country is of course far from perfect.

Sam Neill's kunekune pig (named after his friend the Australian actor Bryan Brown,) is a rare female Bryan. Photo / RNZ, Samuel Rillstone

“We have problems which we need to address. I’m concerned with some of the directions the country is going in but in the meantime, I’ll go out and have a word to Helena Bonham Carter, who’s my favourite cow, and talk things over with her.”

In recent years, Neill has stopped following the international news cycle and says he feels better for making that choice.

“It wasn’t just bad. It was bad for me. The news from the Middle East and from Ukraine and from the United States is so uniformly bleak. I don’t need to bleed all day so I just avoid it, you know, because what can I do about it? There’s nothing I can do.

“So instead, I go for a walk. I’ve got a lovely pig up just in the paddock across from me called Bryan and she goes for walks with me and we’re perfectly content.

“I keep myself informed but what you pretty much see before you is a man with his head firmly in the sand.”

We all have to work on our own sense of wellbeing, Neill says.

“You can’t just sort of sit around going ‘I’m not happy’. You’ve got to do something about it, you know.”

Neill spent eight months working as an actor in 2024 on Eric Bana’s upcoming Netflix series Untamed and season three of the Australian courtroom drama The Twelve.

In 2025, Sam Neill returns as Brett Colby, QC, in series three of Aussie courtroom drama The Twelve. Photo / David Dare Parker

Brett Colby, QC - Neill’s character in The Twelve - is a “big windbag lawyer” based on a couple of his Christchurch barrister friends.

In the third series, he’s joined by fellow Kiwis Danielle Cormack as his opposing counsel and singer Marlon Williams as his son.

The Twelve also reunited Neill with his old friend Sir Ian Mune who appears as a tough retired cop.

Mune, 84, who Neill first acted with in the 1977 film Sleeping Dogs, is doing the best acting of his life, he says.

“He was fantastic and it was so, so good to be in his company.”

Neill recently broke up his summer on the farm with an eight-day cruise around New Zealand’s subantarctic islands, south of Rakiura.

For him, the highlight of an all-round fantastic adventure was seeing the unique cliff-climbing Snares penguins.

Snares crested penguins on the Snares. Photo / Jim Eagles

“They don’t have any ropes or crampons or anything. They just have two little claws and a beak and they climb these cliffs up to the top - they’re the only penguins in the world that do this.

“They live in a forest - that’s where they raise their young and that’s where their social lives are. They have sort of streets and there’s a plaza in the middle where they all meet and socialise. They’re highly organised and they raise their fluffy chicks up there.”

Sir Sam Neill’s summer song pick: ‘Bathe In the River’

Written by Don McGlashan and performed by the Mount Raskil Preservation Society and Hollie Smith, this “quintessentially New Zealand” song featured in Neill’s friend Toa Fraser‘s film No 2.

“It’s one of the great New Zealand tracks, I think.”