For a while chemotherapy worked; for a while it didn’t. At one particularly dire point, he was “working against the clock”, thinking of stories he’d like his beloved children and grandchildren to know. Away from his farm, Two Paddocks in Otago, he was single, isolating in his flat in Sydney. Sometimes the only living things he’d see for days would be the “array of weird and wonderful Australian birds. I was a bit like the bird man of Alcatraz”. He’s laughing now but it sounds horrendous. Writing the memoir, he says, was “a way to keep my spirits up”.
It was time travel, finding solace wondering where he might go next. There are favourite moments and people from his career, and his formative years in New Zealand and Ireland, where he lived until the family shipped home, from Omagh when he was seven: a huge and confusing event in the life of the-then Nigel Neill. He conjured up company: his parents and adored maternal grandmother “Gaggie” left behind in Ireland, who nurtured his love of rescuing animals and birds. “Some days I’d be grumpier than others, and that would bring out the grumpy in me. And other days I was quite elated, by being able to write, and being alive…” he says now.
Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Isabella Sermon and DeWanda Wise in a scene from Jurassic World Dominion. Photo / Supplied
Whilst written in a dark night of the soul, it’s an incredibly funny, touching book. But the truly welcome twist is that, against the odds, he is in remission now. He’s having tennis lessons and has recently gone back to work on a new series based on a novel by Big Little Lies writer Liane Moriarty, opposite Annette Bening.
“[It] would never cross my mind to retire,” he says. He cites an ageing Robert Mitchum’s requirement when reading scripts: “days off, and good locations”. He’s joking, sort of… “I remember reading an interview [with him, at] probably my age now, and I was sort of slightly outraged, like ‘this man doesn’t take his job seriously at all’ but I completely know what he was talking about now.”
Whilst he seems slightly more reserved and perhaps shyer than the social media persona he shared with the world during the lockdowns, he laughs easily. “Take what you do seriously but never yourself seriously,” as he says in the book.
He’s such a familiar face on screen, and so believably of nowhere and everywhere, it’s hard to fathom now just how unlikely that career once seemed. But as he writes of his home town of Dunedin: “I’m from a small city in a small country, profoundly isolated from the rest of the world, at the deep south of the Pacific Ocean. The idea that I could become an actor was so far over someone else’s horizon that I never gave it a second thought.”
He writes of his pride of having a hand in some truly great moments of film history: Sleeping Dogs which launched his career in 1977, and was the first film made in New Zealand to be seen internationally; and of course The Piano in 1993, which won Jane Campion her first Oscar and made her the first female director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Then there are the blockbusters. Steven Spielberg’s Dr Alan Grant took his career to the next level with Jurassic Park, with Neill as the perfect dependable everyman, his on-screen “normality” easing the film’s flight into the totally fantastical. Neill claims to be “completely baffled” as to why Spielberg wanted him for Jurassic Park, which returns to cinemas for its 30th anniversary this week.
Sam Neill in a Jurassic sized pickle in 2001's Jurassic Park III.
“Jurassic Park was a really good example of why there is no substitute for going out to the movies,” he says. “It was like an immersive experience. I remember going to a screening in Harlem where people made so much noise, whooping and hollering, that you could hardly hear the dinosaurs roar. And then another one in Tokyo a week later, in absolute silence. The curious thing was that both audiences enjoyed the movie equally.”
One of the best surreal turns in a career full of what he terms “unexpected accidents” was the mentorship of the British actor James Mason. Never having been beyond Australia, out of nowhere Mason called him, and sent him a ticket to meet him and his wife Clarissa in Europe, taking him under his wing and finding him an English agent. They taught him to ski, and nurtured his enduring love of good food and wine.
“I had a funny old suitcase,” he remembers of this gauche 30-year-old – a laid-back English graduate, who’d spent most of his 20s working for the National Film Unit making documentaries and mucking about growing vegetables in his suburban garden. “I had a bottle of aftershave and it smashed somewhere between Sydney and Geneva…” It was all over his clothes for his mentorship to “a consummate screen actor”. What was it, I ask? “Eau Sauvage or something ridiculous…”
A little less gauche, in the Nineties, competing with his friend Pierce Brosnan, he was in the running to play 007. A screen test recently surfaced in which, for once, you can see his heart clearly wasn’t in it.
“It was one rather excruciating moment in a long career but people keep asking me about the Bond thing,” he says. “And I can only say I’m very glad I’m not an ex-Bond but I do have a couple of recommendations.” He suggests Scottish Jack Lowden (continuing the tradition of a Scottish Bond, like Sean Connery with whom he memorably starred in The Hunt for Red October) and the Australian Robert Collins, “[He’s] an indigenous actor, extremely handsome, and really good. He’d shake things up a bit.”
These days, at 75, Neill seems to have moved beyond the person he once described as a “little bit remote”: a self-sufficient product of a traditional boarding school education (New Zealand on a very English model) all too ready to spend adult life packed-off to far flung film sets and lonely hotel rooms. In his book, he goes as far to apologise to his exes for mistakes, and writes philosophically (and very gallantly) of the three happy decades he had with his ex-wife and mother of his daughters, Noriko Watanabe (a celebrated hair and make-up designer).
Yet he hasn’t exorcised all his anxieties. Still thinking about James Mason he adds: “It was a complete surprise to me that even at that time in his life, every time a job would end, he would think, that’s it, I will never work again. And that of course is every actor’s greatest fear. I think we all suffer from that, to a greater or lesser extent. The other thing of course is imposter syndrome. And you think: ‘Why me? Why do they want me for this part?’ That’s universal I think.”
In his case, this question of identity is at the heart of who he is. Unlike so many of his LA colleagues, he’s never had therapy but hopes the book has given him more self-knowledge. “In the course of writing all this I had to sort of self-examine a bit. And I realised that there is a sort of duality in me: one is Nigel, who is kind of a British persona, I think. And the other one is Sam, who is from the other side of the world.”
His adored mother was English, but the family spent formative years in Northern Ireland. “There’s something about being in Ireland, whether it’s the north or south, that always makes me feel comfort and weirdly at home. It’s not my home, but it feels like I’m at home and I’ve never worked out whether that’s in my DNA or [because] I spent time there as a child. I’d need to shrink to pull that one apart,” he says.
In New Zealand, he struggled to fit in. Aged 11, he decided to swap “Nigel” to his cooler nickname “Sam”, hoping to have a better time at school than he had to date as a stuttering strange posh import who didn’t like sport. In a book inspired by gratitude for his adventures, his school days are an aberration. He writes of never being able to forget the sound of “six- or seven-year old boys quietly weeping themselves to sleep every night”.
Just as with writing his book in the past year, it was his imagination which got him through. “I found fiction a great way of living in another world, when I was inhabiting one that could be unpleasant at times” he says. He lost himself in Arthur Ransome, Mark Twain and CS Lewis. At an establishment called Medbury, where he became a boarder when he was 9, he writes memorably that he doesn’t recall ever seeing anyone “actually happy”.
The corporal punishment liberally doled out created a lifelong loathing of any kind of physical violence, even when being asked to do it on screen. (When he had to hit Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, he struggled to perform the film’s toughest scene and was “convulsed with shock and sadness” afterwards). Sick of being sent reminders of the place, he once even wrote to ask to be taken off the old boys’ mailing list. “Boarding school is such an odd idea, isn’t it? That you, at great expense, throw your children into an institution. I think it’s really peculiar.”
He clearly adored his mum and dad. Did they know how miserable it was? “No, I think [they felt] that’s what you do. Boys go to boarding school and that’s that. No one stopped to question the wisdom of that, and bless them, we weren’t wealthy – at all – so they gave up a lot to give us all that education.”
In fact, he reveals, it could have been a lot worse. Both his father and grandfather were sent from New Zealand to Harrow and wouldn’t see their parents for two or three years at a time. “My mother intervened. She said, ‘You are not sending those boys to Harrow and that’s that,’ and Dad listened for once. So at least I got to go home in the holidays.”
As an unhappy school boy, he lived for his escapism with his books, the holidays, and eventually the school plays and revues at Christ’s College, where he went at 13. He claims he had “no talent for anything in particular” so shamelessly copied what had given his idolised big brother Michael his kicks. Five years his senior, Michael was the family mimic and performer as well as academically gifted (today he’s an eminent Shakespeare scholar). His little brother decided to get involved too. But looking back, he didn’t just act on stage, where amazingly his stutter would disappear, and where he found a way to survive the ordeal of school.
“You realise that being very British, in a New Zealand context, wasn’t useful,” he remembers. “Having that accent… You just don’t want to be different when you’re small, and so you learn to be something else, and that’s kind of acting in a way. My first performance is becoming a New Zealander I think.”
Despite the fact that it may have started as a bit of an act, these days, he’s a very proud patriot, though often dismayed by current politics. After turning it down once before, last year he finally accepted a knighthood. He was a passionate advocate of Jacinda Ardern and he defends her extreme lockdown policies: “She copped a lot of flak and a lot of it was misogynist… She just became a sort of lightning rod for all the disaffected and disenchanted and everyone with a grievance. And I thought it was incredibly unfair.” In his view, she is “bloody fantastic”.
Despite the many that have bought tickets to see Sam Neill over the years, the one I’m talking to is the antithesis of the remote Hollywood star. Is he most at home, then, in his remote idyll with his animals and trees and vines and a glass of Pinot Noir? “Oh yeah, that’s [who I am now],” he says. “But as I say in the book I think, somewhere deep inside me there’s a little person called Nigel too.”
