«I was thrilled to be able to write and be alive»: Sam Neill Photo by: Borja B. Hojas
When Sam Neill, New Zealand's biggest Hollywood star, wrote his memoir Did I Ever Told You That? he thought he would die. It was the height of the pandemic and he was in isolation, immunocompromised, undergoing treatment for stage 3 blood cancer and all alone for five months. According to him, these were «a bit dark times.»
For a while, the chemotherapy worked; for some time this was not the case. At one particularly difficult moment, he «worked against the clock», thinking about the stories he would like his beloved children and grandchildren to know. Away from his Two Paddocks farm in Otaga, he was alone and isolated in his Sydney flat. Sometimes the only living thing he saw for several days was «many strange and wonderful Australian birds». I was a bit like the birdman from Alcatraz.» He's laughing now, but it sounds terrible. Writing a memoir, he said, was «a way to cheer yourself up.»
It was time travel, finding solace in wondering where he might go next. There are favorite moments and people from his career as well as his formative years in New Zealand and Ireland, where he lived until the family went home from Omagh when he was seven years old: a huge and confusing event in the life of the then Nigel Neal . . He gathered a company: his parents who remained in Ireland and his adored maternal grandmother «Gaggie», who instilled in him a love for saving animals and birds. “Some days I got grumpier than others, and that brought out the grumpiness in me. And on other days I was delighted that I could write and be alive … ”, — he says now.
Although this book was written in the dark night of the soul, it is an incredibly funny and touching book. But the really welcome twist is that, against all odds, he is now in remission. He is taking tennis lessons and has recently returned to work on a new TV series based on Big Little Lies writer Liana Moriarty with Annette Bening.
“It would never have occurred to me to retire,” he says. He cites an aging Robert Mitchum's requirement when reading scripts: «weekends and good seats». He's kind of joking… «I remember reading an interview [with him, at] my age, I guess, and I was kind of indignant, like, 'This guy doesn't take his job seriously at all,' but I'm fine I know he was talking about the present moment.»
Although he seems a little more reserved and perhaps more shy than the social media character he shared with the world during quarantine, he laughs easily. “Be serious about what you do, but never about yourself,” he says in the book.
He's such a familiar face on screen, and so believable anywhere and everywhere, that it's hard to imagine now how unlikely that career once seemed. But as he writes of his hometown of Dunedin, “I come from a small town in a small country, deeply isolated from the rest of the world, in the deep South Pacific. The idea that I could become an actor was so far beyond anyone's horizon that I never thought about it.»
He writes of his pride in having a hand in some of the truly great moments in film history: Sleeping Dogs, which launched his career in 1977 and was the first film made in New Zealand to be shown internationally; and, of course, The Piano in 1993, which earned Jane Campion her first Oscar and became the first female director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Then come the blockbusters. Dr. Alan Grant, played by Steven Spielberg, took his career to the next level in Jurassic Park, where Neal played the perfect and reliable everyman, and his screen «normality» facilitated the film's flight into a completely fantastic world. Neil claims he's «totally puzzled» as to why Spielberg wanted him to star in Jurassic Park, which returns to theaters this week in honor of its 30th anniversary.
«Jurassic Park was a really good example of why nothing beats going to the movies,» he says. “It was like an exciting experience. I remember going to a show in Harlem where people were so noisy and yelling and yelling that you could barely hear the dinosaurs roaring. And a week later, another one in Tokyo, in absolute silence. Curiously, both viewers enjoyed the film equally.»
'It was like an immersive experience': Dern and Neil in Jurassic World: Dominion Credit: Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
One of the best surreal career twists, full of what he calls «unexpected occurrences,» was the mentoring of British actor James Mason. Having never been outside of Australia, Mason called him out of nowhere and sent him a ticket to meet him and his wife Clarissa in Europe, took him under his wing and found an English agent. They taught him how to ski and instilled in him an enduring love of good food and wine.
“I had a funny old suitcase,” he recalls of this awkward 30-year-old, a laid-back English graduate who spent most of his 20s working at the National Film Office, making documentaries and wondering about growing vegetables in his home. suburban garden. “I had a bottle of aftershave, and it broke somewhere between Sydney and Geneva…” It was everywhere on his clothes as a token of the mentorship of the “consummate film actor.” What was it, I ask? «Eau Sauvage or something ridiculous…»
Slightly less tactless: in the nineties, competing with his friend Pierce Brosnan, he claimed the role of agent 007. that his heart was clearly not in it.
“It was a pretty harrowing moment in my long career, but people keep asking me about Bond,” he says. «And I can only say that I'm very glad I'm not an ex-Bond, but I do have a couple of references.» He suggests Scottish Jack Lowden (continuing the tradition of Scottish Bond like Sean Connery, with whom he memorably starred in The Hunt for Red October) and Australian Robert Collins: “[He is] a local actor, extremely handsome and really good. He would shake things up a bit.”
Today, at 75, Neil seems to have gone beyond what he once called «a bit of an aloof»: a self-sufficient product of traditional boarding school education (New Zealand in a very English model), too willing to spend money. an adult life packed into distant movie sets and lonely hotel rooms. In his book, he goes so far as to apologize to his exes for mistakes, and philosophically (and very gallantly) describes the three happy decades he spent with his ex-wife and mother of his daughters Noriko Watanabe (famous hair and makeup). designer).
However, he did not banish all his worries. Still thinking of James Mason, he adds, “It was a complete surprise to me that even at that time in his life, every time a job was done, he thought, that’s it, I’ll never work again. And this, of course, is the biggest fear of every actor. I think we all suffer from this, to a greater or lesser extent. Another thing, of course, is the impostor syndrome. And you think: “Why me? Why do they need me for this role? I think this is a universal question.
Sam Neill in Death in Brunswick (1990). )
In his case, this question of identity is at the core of who he is. Unlike many of his Los Angeles colleagues, he has never been in therapy, but he hopes the book has given him more self-discovery. “While I was writing all this, I had to do a little introspection. And I realized that there is a kind of duality in me: one of them is Nigel, who I think is a kind of British character. And the other is Sam, he's from the other side of the world.»
His adored mother was English, but the family's formative years were spent in Northern Ireland. “In Ireland, whether in the north or in the south, there is something that always makes me feel comfortable and somehow strange, like at home. It's not my home, but it feels like I'm at home, and I never figured out if it's in my DNA or (because) I spent time there as a kid. I would have to shrink to tear it apart,” he says.
In New Zealand, he struggled to fit in. At age 11, he decided to change «Nigel» to his cooler nickname «Sam», hoping he would do better in school than he used to, being a stuttering weirdo chic importer that I don't like sports. In a book inspired by gratitude for his adventures, his high school years represent an aberration. He writes that he will never be able to forget the sound of «six or seven-year-old boys sobbing quietly before going to sleep every night.»
As with writing the book last year, he was helped by his imagination. “I found fiction to be a great way to live in a different world, while I lived in a world that could be unpleasant at times,” he says. He lost himself in Arthur Ransome, Mark Twain and K.S. Lewis. In an establishment called Medbury, where he settled when he was nine years old, he remarkably writes that he does not remember ever seeing anyone «really happy.»
Neil starring in Australian drama Twelve Photo: Television Stills
The lavish use of corporal punishment engendered a lifelong hatred of any form of physical abuse, even when asked to do so on screen. (When he had to punch Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Zulawski's Possession, he struggled to perform the film's most difficult scene, and after that he «convulsed with shock and sadness.») Tired of being reminded of this place, he once even wrote a letter asking him to be removed from the old guys mailing list. “Boarding school is such a strange idea, isn’t it? That you are giving your children to an orphanage at great cost. I think it's really unusual.»
He clearly adored his mom and dad. Did they know how terrible it was? «No, I think [they felt] that's what you do. The boys go to the boarding school and that's it. No one doubted the wisdom of this, and thank them, we were not rich — at all — so they gave up a lot to give us such an education.
In fact, he says, it could be much worse. His father and grandfather were sent from New Zealand to Harrow and did not see their parents for two or three years. “My mother intervened. She said, «You don't send those boys to Harrow, that's all,» and Dad obeyed this time. So at least I'll have to go home for the holidays.»
As an unhappy schoolboy, he lived for his escape from reality with books, vacations, and eventually school plays and revues at Christ's College, where he entered at 13. He claims he «had no talent for anything in particular,» which he copied so shamelessly that his adored older brother, Michael, enjoyed it. Five years his senior, Michael was a family imitator and entertainer, as well as academically gifted (today a distinguished Shakespeare scholar). His younger brother also decided to take part. But in retrospect, he didn't just play on stage, where his stuttering miraculously disappeared and where he found a way to survive school trials.
View this post on Instagram :hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;»>Post posted by SamNeillTheProp (@samneilltheprop)
“You realize that being very British, in a New Zealand context, was useless,” he recalls. “Having that accent… You just don’t want to be different when you’re little, and so you learn to be someone else, and that sort of works. I think my first performance will be a New Zealander.”
Although it may have started as a small act, he is a very proud patriot these days, though often dismayed by current politics. After refusing once, last year he finally accepted a knighthood. He was a passionate supporter of Jacinda Ardern and defends her harsh lockdown policy: “She took a lot of criticism and a lot of it was misogynistic… She just became a kind of lightning rod for all the discontented and frustrated and everyone who has grievances. . And I thought that was incredibly unfair.» In his opinion, she is «damn fantastic.»
Despite years of buying tickets to meet Sam Neill, the one I'm talking to is the exact opposite of a distant Hollywood star. So he feels at home in his distant idyll with his animals, trees, vines and a glass of Pinot Noir? “Oh yes, that’s [who I am now],” he says. “But, as I say in the book, I think that somewhere deep inside me, too, there is a little man named Nigel.”
The 30th Anniversary Reissue of Jurassic Park is now in cinemas. This interview was taken before the ongoing cast strike
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