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"If someone comes up to me when I'm having coffee, it'll generally be a question about dinosaurs"
Sam Neill left behind fighting dinosaurs to play a combative lawyer in The Twelve. Now he’s back with a new case…
ITV
- Craig McLean
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Sam Neill lets it be known – mildly, drily, wryly – that I’m disturbing his television watching when we speak via videocall. “I’ve been bingeing the new series the last two days – I’ve one episode to go. I’m not watching it now, because I’m talking to you.”
Said show is The Twelve, specifically the second series of the Australian legal drama that stars the Northern Irish-born, New Zealand-raised Neill as defence barrister Brett Colby.
Neill is the only returning actor in the series, possibly because no one really expected The Twelve to come back. Neill certainly didn’t. “Not at all,” he confirms. “But it was – if this is the right word – surprisingly successful. It was streamed 26 million times [on ITVX] in the UK alone. I was staggered.”
And he took little persuasion to reprise the role of the greying defence lawyer, “because he’s a character to whom I relate so strongly. I’m pathetically addicted to my work. That’s what I see in him, too. He’s amused by life. I am, too. But he’s combative and competitive. I don’t relate to those at all. But I can see how the ebb and the thrust of cross-examination must be exhilarating.”
Sam Neill as Colby SC and Kate Mulvany as Kate Lawson in The Twelve. ITV
At 74, Neill concedes that he’s “getting close to the end of my useful action movie days,” yet is as busy as ever. This year he also appears alongside Annette Bening in mystery series Apples Never Fall, an adaptation of the novel by Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies), and as we speak, he’s in Vancouver to film the Netflix park ranger thriller Untamed alongside Eric Bana. “I’m Smokey Bear himself,” he says, a smile twitching his lips. “I love the hat.”
But as for his big-screen work, he confirms that one franchise adventure is over. After starring as Dr Alan Grant in three Jurassic Park movies, with a comeback in the $1 billion-grossing Dominion in 2022, he’s done with the dinosaurs – he’s not in the upcoming film that has the working title of Jurassic World 4.
“I think all of us old hands are done. My understanding is that it’s a completely new, young cast,” he says (the film is apparently set to star Scarlett Johansson and Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey). “But it was a privilege, and I suppose it’s a trademark. Here in Vancouver, if someone comes up when I’m having coffee, it’ll generally be a question about dinosaurs.”
I think all of us old hands are done with Jurassic Park
He’s equally accepting of another film that’s proceeding without him – the movie of Peaky Blinders. Although this couldn’t be helped, given that his character, venal military officer Chester Campbell, was killed off at the end of the second series.
“I follow it with great interest, I miss it, and I’m really glad I was there at the beginning,” Neill says, adding that he was “very pleased” to catch up with Cillian Murphy the day after this year’s Oscars, where the Irishman won best actor for Oppenheimer. “I happened to be in LA and it was great to have a reunion under wonderful circumstances. He was very uncharacteristically one-too-many drinks under the weather! That’s not how I know Cillian at all.” Later, Murphy would stay at Neill’s New Zealand farm while his son, Aran, who’s 15 years old, shot a film (Klara and the Sun) in the country – “I think it was a nice break for him after a crazy few weeks.”
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As for his own link to Ireland, Neill and I are speaking in the week the inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing finally began. When I ask him how much of a connection he feels to the town of his birth, he first expresses amazement at the news.
“I didn’t know that. All these years later – I’m floored that it’s taken this long…” He shakes his head and is silent for a moment before launching, reflectively, into a story. “I visited Omagh and felt like I made my peace with the place. I stopped at a café and the woman who brought me my cup of tea said very quietly [perfect Northern Irish accent]: ‘We’re very proud of you here.’
“She couldn’t have said a nicer thing. The fact that that was recognised and acknowledged – I’m still touched. When I was ill a couple of years ago, I wrote a memoir and I tell that story in there.”
That casual acknowledgement – “when I was ill” – doesn’t quite cover Neill’s circumstances, which one suspects may have inspired some of his introspection. He revealed last March that he has stage-three blood cancer, which means he will have to have chemotherapy for the rest of his life. And he is, again, sanguine about the situation. “It’s just once a month now. I go in on a Friday and I’m no good to anyone until about Tuesday,” he explains.
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“So, I have a rough three days. But after that, I’m jumping around, going to the gym, going to work, and life is great! I feel more alive, in a physical and psychological sense, than I ever have.”
Authors
Craig McLean
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