The veteran film star has been cheering people up online during lockdown. He talks about the mini-films he has been posting, the joy of wine – and why he is returning to Jurassic Park
Unusually in this year of shuttered cinemas, Sam Neill is the star of a No 1 box-office smash. The film in question, Jurassic Park, was first released in 1993, and has played exclusively at drive-in cinemas this year, but a chart-topper is a chart-topper. “Isn’t that funny?” says the 72-year-old, stroking his impressive white beard and speaking via Zoom from
Sydney, where he has been holed up throughout lockdown with his girlfriend, the political TV journalist Laura Tingle, far from his own home in New Zealand. “And here’s the other thing I discovered,” he continues. “Which
Australian film of mine do you think is the most successful in terms of box office?”
Perhaps it was My Brilliant Career, the 1979 period drama that inspired James Mason to pay Neill’s way to the
UK to boost his prospects. It worked, by the way: Neill, who was born in Northern
Ireland but had been living in
New Zealand since he was seven, won the lead in the third Omen movie, The Final Conflict, where he played the son of Satan as if he were the loneliest man in the world. Or maybe his biggest Australian money-spinner was A Cry in the Dark, in which he and
Meryl Streep did some of their fiercest work as the real-life couple falsely accused of killing their own baby and blaming it on dingoes. There was Aussie money, too, in Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning The Piano, featuring Neill as a cuckolded colonialist. But no: each of these, he reveals, was roundly trounced at the
box office by Peter Rabbit, a US-Australian co-production, in which Neill wore a fat-suit to play a curmudgeonly farmer. “I wouldn’t have guessed myself,” he says, eyes twinkling with mischief.