Dante would have fun playing around with Twitter in one of his Hell circles, but, surprisingly, among the petty feuds and pettier political meltdowns, there might be some good on the social-media platform after all: And we have veteran actor Sam Neill to thank. Because over the past few years, the Jurassic Park star has been broadcasting some quality, wholesome content from his gorgeous New Zealand farm for us to fawn over, with his never-ending parade of cute animal pals always ready for their close-ups. (Most of whom, in another fun twist, are named after celebrities.) Whether you’re more of a pig-video or a sheep-selfie person, Neill’s Twitter is a good-pastoral-vibes-only type of place, so leave your city slicker attitude at the door, okay?
This week, Neill was nice enough to indulge Vulture with a chat about his life on the farm and how it feels that his animals are now bona fide social-media icons. Among the pigs, sheep, ducks, rams, and chickens, Neill has plenty of anecdotes, and only one them involves death-by-boning.
I want to know all about your farm! How long have you lived there and where exactly is it located? And do you get to live there most of the year?
I’d say I get to live there, in Central Otago, New Zealand, about half of the year. I always spend time in Sydney, but I’m at the farm as much as I can be. I’ve got four little vineyards and the farm is the heart of it. My chickens, sheep, goats — the whole menagerie is there. [Laughs.] A couple of them have become unwitting media stars. I used to do a blog on my wine label’s website about farm life and what was going on there. But I got kind of bored of that. Same with Facebook, too. It got really tiresome. I enjoy Twitter because it’s really instant. It’s one thing doing a blog post, but with Twitter and Instagram, you get immediate feedback from people. You know what people are enjoying. I’ve worked out that what I enjoy and what I find funny is what people enjoy, too.
I have to say, like many people on Twitter, there’s a lot to be angry about in the world at the moment. There’s a lot of be anxious about. I used to do a lot more angry posts. But there are enough angry voices as it is! What’s amusing me today? It’s mostly my duck. I really don’t know why people have reacted so strongly to the farm, but it’s definitely a nice thing to have happen.
It seems like an idyllic place, especially when I look at your photos from my tiny New York apartment.
I just love being there, puttering around. I do work there occasionally. It’s not just playing with ducks. But I do have my diversions there. I love to name as many of my animals as possible after my friends. It doesn’t always end well. Meryl Streep was killed by a ferret recently. I found her as a pile of feathers one day.
Oh, jeez. Have you had any other animal demises lately?
Hugo Weaving was another unfortunate end, but he died happy. He was a ram. He was doing what rams do — he fell off the back of a female sheep. We found him with his feet up in the air the next day. They’re very, very, busy boys, those rams. It’s a little-known fact that the most prodigious mammal on the planet is a ram. Rams can service, shall we say, up to 80 females in a day. There’s no other male animal on the planet that has that capability. He went the distance and died on the job.
You famously also name a lot of your animals after celebrities as “insurance policies,” so you won’t be enticed to eat them. But have you ever named an animal after an enemy and then … eaten it?
What a vicious idea, coming from someone from New York! [Laughs.]
How many animals are roaming around at any given time?
I’ll have to think about that. They all serve productive functions. As cute as they are, they’re not decorative. The sheep are used as lawnmowers. The pigs make manure. I believe at the last count I had 25 sheep, about a dozen chickens, a few goats, three pigs, and one duck. Although I got a few new duck friends arriving soon! I’m very keen on native birds, so I’ve planted a lot of native shrubs and trees to entice them to fly to the area and keep predators at bay. They’re all outdoor animals, I should also note. I don’t encourage them to come inside my house.
Do these animals generally get along with each other? Are there any unlikely friendships or feuds among them?
A friend of mine had an older horse that she brought to the farm a while ago. Down the road from the farm, a wild sheep turned up out of the blue about a year ago. It hadn’t been shorn in years! A friend asked if I could look after it, so I said yes. We put the sheep next to the horse, and they’ve become absolutely inseparable. They’re two old men. They’re never more than ten yards apart. They nuzzle each other all day. The horse doesn’t like other horses — through the years, he would fight with them all. But he took to the sheep immediately and they completely love each other. When it rains, the sheep goes under the horse and he stays dry that way.
There’s been some aggro behavior on the farm these past few weeks. I have two male pigs, Angelica and Taika Waititi, who have been fighting for the female pig, Imogen Poots. Taika has another girlfriend down the road, but his job is to, uh, have conjugal responsibilities with Imogen. But Angelica has had his way with Imogen illegally before and has made many other attempts to see her. He’s broken down several fences to see her and has been in contention with Taika, who’s twice his size. They’ve come to blows a lot. Angelica finally lost out and has a lot of scars on his face now.
I want to bring up some specific animals of yours. I’m fascinated how Charlie the duck thinks you’re his dad. How did he waddle his way into your life?
I bought three Muscovy ducks a few years ago, and Charlie Pickering was always the friendliest of them. One of my employees was driving too fast into the farm one day and flattened Charlie’s two friends. They died. Poor Charlie was left on his own after that. There’s something about that duck! He loves being in my company and I love hanging around with him, too. I have a small lake on the farm, and in the summer I like to swim laps, and he likes to swim laps with me. Or rather, I shouldn’t say “he.” I always thought Charlie was a male, and then she laid eggs one day. That was quite a surprise, but then some wild ducks came and destroyed the eggs. That was probably disappointing for Charlie.
We’re getting new friends for Charlie in the next few weeks, so we’ll see how that goes. If they don’t bond, Charlie is No. 1 for me, and they’ll be returned. I really like Muscovy ducks; they’re really sociable. I tried having Indian Runner ducks, but they would always run away. I had to sell them. What’s the point of having an animal if they don’t like you?
How often do you do yoga with The Pig?
I love hanging out with The Pig. He comes to life beside me, but he respects my space if I just want to kick back, relax, and read a book next to him. I took a few selfies of me recently reading Fire and Fury, and he was in the background looking shocked that I was reading it. [Laughs.] I’ll admit the yoga isn’t a daily occurrence.
Has Helena Bonham Carter the cow had any more calves?
Yes, she has! She’s recently been shamelessly flirting with Jimmy Nesbitt, my bull. She’s competing for his favors with another female cow. She’s been at it for days now. I avert my eyes.
How does a cow flirt?
Nuzzling and sniffing backsides. Helena is a piece of work in the love department, I’ll tell you. The real Helena writes me an email once in a while, and I fill her in with what’s going on with her cow. But I try to avoid telling the more graphic details.
Are any of your celeb friends overly invested in their animal counterparts?
Imogen Poots is very invested. She’s filming something two miles down the road from me right now, so she’s anxious to finally meet her pig.
If you could be reincarnated as one of your farm animals, what would you be and why?
All of the animals generally live long, happy, and fruitful lives. If attention is one thing to go by, I’d be one of my rams. They have, at any one time, 30 or 40 girlfriends who just adore them. To be well loved in life is as much as one can hope for, isn’t it?
Source: The Vulture
While at the Ovation portion of the TCA Press Tour, Collider got the opportunity to sit down and chat 1-on-1 with Sam Neill about how privileged he felt to have an experience like this, how daunting the project, just how immense the Pacific is, having a different appreciation for the world around him, the stand-out memories, why he has no desire to retire from acting, and what he has coming out next.
Collider: What was it like to get to have an experience like this?
SAM NEILL: It was a privilege. In the first episode, I went to Raiatea, which is the most sacred island in the Pacific. And then, we end up in Alaska, and you couldn’t ask for more contrast. We go to go to amazing places. It was not only a big experience, but it was a profound experience that was very moving for me, at times.
Does that make it hard to go back to regular life and acting, after you finish something like this?
NEILL: Well, I had a bit of a guilty conscience, at the end of the year, to do my day job again. I took four movies last year, to make up for it. It’s not a travel log, but it is a travel log. It’s not a history series, but it is about history. It’s not an art series, but it certainly is concerned with the arts. It’s not a political series, but it does touch on politics.
When this idea was brought to you, what was your initial reaction to doing this?
NEILL: It was daunting because you’re taking on something that’s potentially controversial. There are a lot of Cook enthusiasts, and there are a lot of Cook haters out there. I realized there was a lot for me to learn, and it was already apparent to me that the history that I was taught at school wasn’t actually right, so it was good to get some wholly different perspectives. But once we jumped into it, it was a an immersive process, sometimes literally.
At any point were you like, “Why did I sign up for this? Can I be done now?”
NEILL: Quite often, but I would do it again, in a heartbeat. And there are places that I would go back to tomorrow, if I could. The Aleutian Islands, for instance, is absolutely amazing, and American soil, by the way. We forget that the Pacific is so immense. You can fly forever, and you’re still not there. It’s that sense of scale, if you can try to get your head around what these great voyages were – Cook’s voyages and the Polynesians before him. Every voyage was dangerous, the most traumatic being when Cook’s crew struck the Great Barrier Reef. There was a whole cascade of good fortune that they had. A coral head put a hole in the front of the ship, which should have sunk like a stone, but, they were finally able to get off of the reef, after two tides. They were all in a state of mortal terror, out of the sight of land, and no one on board could swim, which is an extraordinary thought. They used a sail covered in animal shit, because they had animals on board, for glue, like a bandage over the hole in the bow of the boat. What they didn’t know was that, underneath the bandage, the very coral head that had put the hole in the ship was stuck in there, and the bandage was holding it in place. Cook had a lot of very good luck. They didn’t have GPS, so they didn’t know where they were. They were sailing into uncharted waters, as were the Polynesians before them. Looking for what? Nobody knew.
Do you feel like you have a different appreciation for the world, in general, after doing this series?
NEILL: We always have to remind ourselves of how fragile life on this planet is, and what responsibilities we have. I was talking to the British High Commissioner, and part of her remit is the Pitcairn Islands. There’s one uninhabited Pitcairn Island, which is the epicenter of floating plastic in the world. You could not be in a more remote place, if you tried, and yet, all of the plastic in civilization lands up there. It’s a really heartbreaking idea.
What were the most memorable times you had on this journey?
NEILL: I met the most extraordinary people, all over the Pacific, but especially the people in Vanuatu who, in a material sense, are the poorest people I’ve ever come across. They own nothing, but in a well being sense, they are easily the wealthiest people that I’ve come across. These people are completely content and happy. It’s a reminder that a new car is just a bloody new car. It’s not going to make you happy. These people don’t own anything. They live incredibly simple lives, and they do it deliberately. They aren’t wearing t-shirts from the Gap. The aren’t interested in air conditioning. They have all that they think they need.
When you felt like you needed to return to acting, did it change how you wanted to choose projects?
NEILL: I’m 71 now, but I still want to put a few more rounds on the board. I’m conscious that there’s only a limited amount that I’ll get done, before I get shuffled into retirement, but I certainly have no desire to retire. I care, but I don’t care. If it looks like fun and it looks like quality, then I’ll do it. I don’t feel compelled to work, or not to work. I did four films last year, that I really enjoyed all of, but I was really exhausted, at the end of the year. I thought I might have worked a bit too hard, so this year, I will work a bit less, but I’m sure there are lots of things around that look like they might be fun.
What can you say about the films you have coming out next?
NEILL: [Ride Like a Girl] is a feel-good family type of film. It’s about the first woman, who won the Melvin Cup as a jockey. Teresa Palmer plays that character, and I play her father. It’s a girl power story. And then, I did [Palm Beach], that Rachel Ward wrote and directed, with Bryan Brown, Greta Scacchi and Richard E. Grant. That’s about a reunion weekend.
The Pacific: In the Wake of Captain Cook airs on Thursday nights on Ovation.
Source: Collider.com
This summer we look back at some of the best stories of the year. This one, Kim Knight’s interview with Sam Neill, was first published in August.
From the air, it looks like Lego. Little boxes, on the ocean. Somewhere, dwarfed by those five-high stacks of blue and yellow and red and orange shipping containers, is New Zealand’s most famous actor.
Sam Neill opens his cabin door. It’s sparse. There’s no concierge, no room service. He’s lugging his own luggage.
“I loved it,” he says. “I want to go back.”
To a container ship?
“Yeah,” he replies, smiling at himself.
“We worked very hard on board, but there was something about being in a relatively confined space, with no communication to the rest of the world. It wasn’t like a plane, which is pretty claustrophobic, there was no claustrophobia, you were going with purpose. It was very calm.”
There are, he says, not too many spaces like that in his life.
In the beginning there was Sam Neill.
His first film was arguably New Zealand’s first film. There were earlier Kiwi-made movies but 1977’s Sleeping Dogs was the country’s first feature-length project released into the United States. It made a Neill a movie star.
“Somebody said that figure the other day.”
That wouldn’t, Neill adds, include his television work.
Reilly, Ace of Spies. The Tudors. Merlin. Peaky Blinders. There’s even a voice credit for The Simpsons. Later this month, he’ll play himself. Uncharted with Sam Neill is a six-episode exploration of the impact of Captain James Cook’s voyages. It starts with a four-day stint on a container ship. It ends — well, when do we stop interrogating history?
“Cook’s voyages mean so many things to so many people on so many different levels,” says Neill. “There’s a sort of 10-year-old in me that cannot imagine anything more wonderful than to be on The Endeavour and to go where no European had ever been before. These incredibly beautiful places, and to meet completely new people and cultures that you couldn’t imagine or dream up.
“On a very different level of course, Cook changed everything. And there are so many profound and troubling questions that need to be examined.”
That was Neill at the wine and canape media launch of the series and the accompanying book, The Pacific: In the Wake of Captain Cook. His hair was neat, his voice was slow and measured. He did not appear to partake in the mini salmon tarts with wasabi caviar or the sticks of fried chicken. He took a high stool on a small stage and declared: “It’s going to be controversial. Which is a good thing. The more controversial the better. There will be people who will say this is political correctness gone mad. There will be others who will say this is just more burnishing of the Cook bullshit.
“There are Cookaphiles who just think Cook was Superman and there are people who think he was a rapist — and a syphilitic racist.”
Later, he clarifies there is no evidence of Cook “ever having sex with anyone other than Mrs Cook” — but the ship’s celebrated botanist Joseph Banks? “He was what’s known in Australia as a root rat. And I don’t defend that.”
It is 250 years since Cook left England on a scientific voyage to record the transit of Venus across the sun from Tahiti. Mission complete, he opened the sealed orders that resulted in the first European circumnavigation of New Zealand. There would be two more epics voyages before Cook was killed in Hawaii.
“One of the intriguing ideas,” says Neill, “And this comes from [anthropologist and Professor Dame] Anne Salmond, was that Cook himself was colonised by the Pacific, and became stitched into the fabric of the Pacific. Well, I think that’s what’s happened to me and my family.”
Neill is one of those celebrities with too much backstory for a weekly magazine word count. He must be reduced to bullet points: Born Nigel John Dermot Neill in Northern Ireland. Dad is a third-generation New Zealander, serving with the Irish Guards. In 1954, he moves his family home. Nigel changes his name to Sam, outgrows a stutter, schools mostly in Christchurch, marries and separates twice, has children and stepchildren, becomes an internationally renowned actor, buys a vineyard in Central Otago and wins awards for his Two Paddocks pinot noir. His future is, literally, planted in Aotearoa.
Neill took a year off movies to make Uncharted. He followed Cook’s wake through Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Norfolk Islands, Antarctica, Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii — where the guy at the rental car desk would unwittingly ask the man who played paleontologist Dr Alan Grant, whether he’d like any information on the Jurassic Experience.
“I didn’t know what I was going to find or who I was going to talk to,” says Neill. But over and over, he receives a clear message: “These weren’t discoveries. Everything had been discovered before. But that was the last connection. The last piece of connectedness on the planet. Cook was responsible for that.
“He did open the door and what came through the door was colonisation which, in many cases, was catastrophic. Catastrophic to culture, to loss of life — the list is endless. One of the most distressing things for me was in the Bay of Islands, talking to someone there and I paused for a moment and said, ‘When you look at me, do you see a colonist?’ And she said, ‘Of course.’ And that struck me with such great force because, you know, I’m fourth generation of this country but it doesn’t seem enough.
“So, um, yeah — but you know, let’s talk about that for a moment. To use a coarse phrase, shit happens. And shit, it happened here. And we’re all part of it. Personally, I’m very encouraged by what’s happened in New Zealand in the last 20 or 30 years. I think we’ve taken a really good look at ourselves. There’s still a long way to go, but we’re more conscious of what we are now.”
Neill says ignorance is not bliss.
“Ignorance is that way hell lies. We need to know the whole story, we can’t just sweep things under rugs and hope they never happened because they did and we need to arm ourselves with knowledge.”
And responsibility. Neill didn’t play it safe at that media launch. Everywhere he travelled, he says, he saw evidence that Australia and New Zealand were losing interest in the Pacific.
“There’s a vacuum. And who is coming into that vacuum? The Chinese. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I don’t know, but I’m a little bit anxious about Chinese ambitions. This is a government that is not particularly interested in human rights, or many of the things we take for granted. I think we need to be more cognisant of the Pacific. About where we are. About our responsibility as leaders in the Pacific.”
“Was I too frank?”
It’s the next morning and Neill is dutifully doing his media one-on-ones at the Hilton. He was staring out to sea when Canvas arrived in the room with the Antipodes sparkling water and mini Whittaker’s chocolate bars. Neill has claimed Cook was “a hard man to read”. But what to make of this actor who, on the one hand travels with miniature plastic pink pigs he captions for laughs on social media — and on the other champions big and serious causes. Neill has spoken out against cubicle dairy farming in the Mackenzie Country. He recently suggested a boycott of Cadbury’s should its Dunedin factory closure go ahead. He is appalled at the Australian Government’s decision to detain 1600 asylum-seekers in Papua New Guinea.
“Personally, I think Manus and Nauru are a disgrace. I’m very proud and pleased to see our Prime Minister taking a humane stance about some of these unfortunate people and saying they can come to us. That’s the kind of thing we can do. We should really be the humane face.
“It’s very easy, because we’re so isolated and we live on islands, to forget we are an important part of this region. We need to remember our leadership roles here as a First World country, we need to be leading the way with all sorts of issues. Climate change, the pollution of this great ocean, the conservation of species.”
He recognises that, 170 years ago, “My great-grandfather was a coloniser.
“But,” he says, harking back to Cook’s Pacific experience, “I think we’re part of the fabric of New Zealand now. My grandchildren and my nephews are Māori. And I’ve become more aware of being not just from New Zealand, but from this region. From the Pacific.”
And this idea that wounds are slowly being salved? That in telling the whole story of Cook’s journeys — from, as Neill puts it — “the other side of the beach” — we can somehow shift the story?
“Look, all of this is fraught and I do not pretend to be an authority on any of it and I cannot tell any of these stories from an indigenous point of view. But what I did do was listen to them. And that’s important. It’s enormously confrontational, a lot of the time. There were things that broke my heart, things that shocked me beyond all measure. But also I was filled with hope and optimism in so many places. And I am optimistic about New Zealand.”
Neill’s corner of the country is Central Otago. It’s cold down there right now. Grape vines bare, ice on the ground. That, he says, is where he finds his quiet. On the farm with its animals named for famous people, on the Two Paddocks vineyard, which is actually spread across four sites. He went to university for a while in Dunedin, but didn’t like it.
“It wasn’t the happiest time of my life. It was completely sort of rugger bugger — you know, dental student jocks. There was very little intellectual life going on there. I couldn’t find any drama to do or anything like that. I got out of there … all of my schooling and university was pretty much in Christchurch.”
He was behind the camera before he was in front of it. In Uncharted, he professes a love of volcanoes. Ngauruhoe was his first, he tells Canvas. He was making a skiing film for the National Film Unit. “It was in semi-eruption, we got stuck up there because the clouds rolled in, and the wind changed and we started to choke to death, we thought we were going to die …
“Look at that one right behind you,” he says, gesturing to Rangitoto. “It’s only 600 years old. We are on a live volcanic field. I don’t want to be too pessimistic about this, but there might be some karma involved here. When that volcanic field goes, ‘I’ve had enough of this’.”
He’s made himself smile again. He’s like that unpredictable uncle at Christmas.
Last night: “Ghosts are interesting, actually. I felt ghosts everywhere.”
This morning: “There’s a hill near my place. Well, half a hill. The other half is in Nelson. Don’t sleep easy in your beds New Zealand!”
Neill thrives on unpredictability.
“There must have been a time when I was at the National Film Unit when I could sort of see my years ticking away in a government department until I’d retire to my cabbages in Eastbourne — and when that didn’t happen …
“Sometimes I felt like — what are those things, pinball machines? — and I was the ball rocketing around, boing, the 20-point thing, and I’d get spat out and I’d get trapped. It was sort of that random, and felt sometimes, like it had that sort of velocity and I didn’t have any particular control over it.
“I just do what comes up, and what happens to be of interest and sometimes I’m not available and sometimes I am but they want someone else. It’s the random nature of it that’s partly appealing.”
Once, he was up for the role of James Bond. Once, he described Hollywood as a narrow kind of life.
“That’s one of my more acute observations. I don’t have many. It is a very limiting life in Hollywood. That’s all anyone is interested in there, is their careers. Frankly, I’ve never been terribly interested in my career. It just sort of muddles along. They’re interested in what last week’s box office is. How did Thor do this week? What about the new Star Wars? I don’t give a flying fig, you know.”
That 80-film oeuvre includes seven for Miramax — the studio headed by Harvey Weinstein, who has now been accused of sexual abuse by more than 80 women. That, surely, is Hollywood’s biggest story right now?
“Mmmm,” says Neill. “I’ve done a few films that Harvey has produced or distributed and I’ve known him vaguely, you know, over the years, at things. I see him at stuff. But I’ve found it profoundly disturbing all the stuff that’s been coming out and I always say, and I say it again, I’ve never seen this. I’ve never seen any of this.
“And then all my female friends say, ‘Well of course you haven’t, because they don’t do it in front of you.’ So I’m baffled and disturbed all at the same time.”
What is it like to have your perception of a certain time and a certain place challenged by someone else’s reality of history?
“Look, we all grew up hearing about the casting couch and things. I never really believed there was such a thing. It was self-evident, back in the days when MGM was starting out and all of that but I lived a very sheltered life. When I first went to Hollywood, apparently everybody was on cocaine. I never knew. Nobody asked me. I’m from the South Island. I’m naive and probably blinkered. I don’t know.”
Neill likes to do this. Emphasise the “just a …” aspect of his CV. Just a winemaker. Just an actor. And yet, he’s the guy who was asked to interview Barack Obama when he visited New Zealand. He’s the guy Greenpeace approached to pretend to eat a plastic bag for an environmental campaign. And it’s actually hard to imagine anyone else doing this Captain Cook thing.
“Oh no,” he says. “There must be lots of people.”
Who?
“Temuera Morrison. He can do anything.”
Uncharted‘s producer Owen Hughes is in the chair next to Neill (the publicist is listening discreetly from the bathroom). Hughes says the just-an-actor’s transtasman credentials are “unparalleled”. Apparently when Neill says “we” in Australia, the Australians think it’s all-inclusive. And the same thing happens in New Zealand.
“Okay,” says Neill. “I’ll take that.”
And the Obama interview?
“I have no idea at all. When he shook my hand, he said ‘you are one of my favourite actors’, but I wanted to say, ‘I bet you say that to all the boys’.”
Later, I’m not sure whether it’s ego or genuine curiosity, but he asks me why I think he got that gig.
Gravitas, I suggest? And he hoots with laughter.
In the beginning, there was Sam Neill. I had just started working for a national newspaper and there was a set visit to the West Coast where he was filming Gaylene Preston’s Perfect Strangers. My editor wanted a news angle. I’d been promised a lengthy sit-down interview. Neill was late. He stood, glaring. The interview was short, useless and I was terrified of my editor’s wrath. I drove to Punakaiki, hoping to pick up scandal, gossip, anything to save the story. At the Pancake Tearooms I stopped for coffee and a slice of fruit cake. There was a man in the booth in front of me. Just him and I, in the whole place. It dawned on me slowly that the label on the back of the stranger’s polar fleece read “Two Paddocks”.
I was very, very nervous when I stood up to interrupt Neill’s very, very alone time. But he was charming. Down the road, while he waited for makeup, he gave me a second, spontaneous interview. I felt like I had met two Sam Neills. I’ve always wondered which one was the anomaly.
Today, he is thoughtful and funny. He shows me the latest shot of his plastic pigs, posed on the “bow” of the Hilton (caption: “Titanic”) and tells a story about the time he dined at the Ivy in London. Theatre director Trevor Nunn and actor Sir Ian McKellen were at the next table.
“Being a New Zealander of a certain age, I quite like a tweed jacket. I had a new tweed jacket which I was quite proud of. I put a tie on …” Neill takes a seat and says hello to the men at the next table. McKellen leans in and says, “Dear boy, what have you come as?”
The “best put-down ever,” claims Neill. Then he remembers the pair did a film together — he thinks McKellen played a servant.
On the vineyard, Neill is “The Prop” (short for proprietor). His top 20 playlist begins with Wilco and PJ Harvey. He posts video of himself hamming it up as an axe-wielding louche. He is not “just” an actor. He has opinions, a point of view. And it is possible his latest might be his most provocative.
“We can’t take anything as read. So much of the history I was taught, and my father’s generation was taught, was so Euro-centric. It’s almost like Young Nick sights Young Nick’s Head from the top of the main mast in the crow’s nest and history begins there. Well, that wasn’t Year Zero at all.”
Uncharted with Sam Neill: Coming soon to Prime.
The Pacific: In the wake of Captain Cook with Sam Neill, by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios (HarperCollins, ($45).
Source: NZ Herald
Sam Neill (“Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) and Michael Caton (“The Animal”) can be seen in-character in the eagerly-anticipated “RAMS” in these exclusive first-look images from the shoot. The pair play sheep farmers and estranged brothers Colin (Neill) and Les (Caton).
The film is a reimagining of Grimur Hakonarson’s earlier picture, which was set in Iceland and won the Un Certain Regard section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. The English-language version is being filmed in Western Australia’s Great Southern region.
The nose breathes in. Time is elastic, this instant frozen for eternity even as it drags us forward into late afternoon and the inevitably blurry end of a long and boozy lunch. Swirl, swirl. He inhales again, taking his time guessing the wine’s provenance. The stakes are high because Sam Neill is not just an actor. Since the 1990s he’s been producing wine, serious wine, from his vineyard home on New Zealand’s South Island. He shook off the dilettante tag early and his Two Paddocks pinot noir has grown a dedicated following in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, picking up trophies and gracing the wine lists of fine-dining restaurants like this one.
“I’m going to look so foolish when I get this wrong,” he says, tilting his glass so its red eddies catch the sunlight streaming through a nearby wall of windows. But then: “There’s something in the middle palate that suggests Central Otago,” Neill says. “It’s entirely possible it’s my wine.” Swirl, swirl. Sniff. Swallow. “I’m going to guess … I think this is my wine.” Addy Lam, head sommelier at The Star Sydney’s Black Bar & Grill and an enthusiastic Sam Neill fan, is hopping foot to foot with barely repressed glee. “Bang on!” he says, topping up our glasses with — I’ve got to be honest — a frankly delicious pinot. “Good, isn’t it?”
It’s a neat trick, making Sam Neill sing for his supper — even if it is just humming a few bars. Because, without this quiz, Addy’s tricky little put-you-on-the-spot heart-stopper, life would just be too seamlessly perfect, wouldn’t it? Plied with fine wine and top-notch food, no curfew in sight. It’s the kind of “working lunch” not seen since the ’80s and because we’re here to talk about Neill’s latest project, a National Geographic wine documentary, the conversation will range across one of his favourite topics. “How nice that they’ve invited us” — his rumbling basso drops a notch — “to drink whatever we want. Given that I have nothing else to do today …” A throaty chuckle. “We can linger.”With Nicole Kidman in the 1989 film Dead Calm.
It’s good to be Sam Neill. He has a widely admired wine label, a still-thriving acting career, even a new late-in-life girlfriend. Heading into his eighth decade, the grandfather-of-four has just been inked with his first tattoo, made waves with a new Captain Cook documentary and become a bona fide social media star, regularly tweeting goofy farmer-Joe photos from a New Zealand address that looks very much like Eden.
And because he’s Sam Neill, the nicest bloke in the world, none of this is taken for granted. “How terrific,” he says now, surveying Sydney Harbour and the cracking blue-sky day. Leaning across a comically large slab of wagyu striploin, he whispers conspiratorially: “We’re going to order a glass of the Grange, aren’t we?”
Neill spent most of last year on and off a container ship as it chugged between Tahiti and Tonga, the Arctic and Alaska. The actor reckons he’s filmed in 60 different countries over the course of his career. But this was something different: an epic voyage to shoot the six-part National Geographic TV series The Pacific: In the Wake of Captain Cook, tracing the explorer’s journey 250 years ago while investigating his impact on the region’s indigenous cultures. “It was the most remarkably moving experience for me,” Neill says. “I did devote a lot of time to it, but I was so moved, so enchanted, so reduced to tears and laughter by the sort of things I was hearing.” He found himself developing a new regard for Cook’s seamanship and pluck while deepening his respect for the indigenous people. His bob-each-way approach drew double the ire. “I’ve taken flak from every possible side since it’s aired,” he laughs. “I’m a Captain Cook apologist, a booster for empire; I’m a loony left revisionist. They’ve been barking at me this week like mad dogs. Mad dogs!”
Not that he’s bothered. Neill cuts an even-keeled swathe through the Twittersphere, his steady-as-she-goes persona a welcome antidote to the mad dogs yapping round the edges. His Twitter bio declares him to be “in the cheering up business” and a quarter of a million people follow his adventures on the farm as he potters about in a procession of woolly coats taking uncontroversial selfies with the animals and cracking delightfully uncontroversial jokes. Sometimes he’ll just post a picture of a perfect red rose.
“I think it’s incumbent upon us to cheer each other up because we’ve had a bleak couple of years, haven’t we?” he says. “It doesn’t sound like a terribly important task but actually it’s vital. When you look around at the current state of politics, whether it’s American or Australian, there are some very sound reasons to despair. But we cannot be helpless before this bleak tide, you know? We have to stand up and let it wash around us and the tide will go out again.”
It was during a brief hiatus from filming The Pacific that the National Geographic people approached him to front Great Innovators: The Rise of Australian Wine. “They said, ‘Do you want to do this film about wine, and I thought, ‘That sounds fantastic!’” There’s that rumbling chuckle again. Heh heh. Seeing a way to further indulge his love of history (he also fronted Why Anzac with Sam Neill in 2015) he happily tumbled down an oenophilic rabbit hole to explore a past in which Australia pioneered such innovations as screwcaps, refrigerated harvesting and the bag-in-a-box. He explored the mid-1960s cultural shift from beer to wine, delved into the science of production, and tracked the adventures of Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold and his chief winemaker Max Schubert as they chased the maddest impulses to produce one of the world’s most collectable, transcendent wines. He even hosted Penfolds’ current chief winemaker, Peter Gago, at his Central Otago home.
Unless you’re a sommelier, it’s a delicate dance to talk seriously about wine and Neill lives in dreaded fear of sounding poncy. He refuses to utter the word “passion”, for instance. “Everybody who grows wine says they’ve got a passion for it,” he says. “I think the word passion should be reserved for the sort of activity that might involve the losing of trousers at some point.” Addy has a suggestion: perhaps “an affair” with wine? “Yes, I like that,” Neill nods. “It has a slightly illicit air to it.”
Throughout lunch, Neill somehow adopts a relaxed slouch while maintaining perfect posture, projecting his golden voice up and out, as if to the last row of a theatre. His phrasing is precise, the tempo leisurely. He’s wearing a bluish tweed jacket and soft-soled shoes and his silver beard is magnificent. He’s the gentleman farmer come to town, with a dash of the derring-do that once had him in contention to be the next James Bond (he lost out to Timothy Dalton). Yes, it’s good to be Sam Neill. It would be even better to be Sam Neill with a glass of Grange in your hand. “So dense, so profound, it’s like the richest Christmas cake you could ever eat,” he says wistfully.
“How’s your piggy going?” Here’s Addy the sommelier again, with more brimming glasses. Pinot grigio and chardonnay, something from Austria and a trendy natural wine, all of them to “try with the salad”. Anyone who follows Neill’s barnyard antics on social media knows the favourite of his three pigs is an elderly but noble porker named Anjelica Huston. “Anjelica is such an expressive pig,” he says now. “If you sit down and read a book about Donald Trump, if you wait long enough, you’ll get a pig looking over your shoulder with the same look of horror and astonishment as you have on your own face.”
Imogen Poots, on the other hand, is an unlikeable sow and Taika Waititi a rather aloof boar. Their namesakes — Neill’s co-star in British black comedy A Long Way Down, and the New Zealand director of Hunt for the Wilderpeople — must be thrilled. Only the lucky ones are named, Neill says, to distinguish the pets from the snacks. “They’re not safe if they’re not given names,” he says ominously, adding that some of Hollywood’s finest have petitioned to be included. “But they have to be a friend. You can’t just be someone I don’t know and expect to be a pig.” The naming process is a random, gender-be-damned affair that has seen a duck named Charlie Pickering surprise the farmworkers by laying three eggs, and two inseparable chicken friends become Meryl Streep and Stephen Fry.
Neill has four small organic vineyards in Central Otago, cradled at the foot of a crooked gorge beneath snow-capped mountains. Fields of saffron and lavender, olives and cherry trees surround the modest homestead near the tiny town of Clyde, and Neill has also planted hundreds of native trees to lure back the birds. “Last time I was there I counted seven different species of native birds,” he says. “A couple of tuis flew out of a kowhai tree and I almost cried with delight.”
Susan Sarandon and the other sheep graze along rows of grapes between seasons, but Helena Bonham Carter, one of a dozen head of cattle, serves a more base purpose. “It would be alarming to be told you’re really there for the manure, wouldn’t it?” Neill’s chuckles are looser now. “I’m here for my good looks? Nah. You’re here for the shit.”With Julian Dennison in Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Picture: supplied
Neill’s father Dermot, a British Army officer and third-generation New Zealander, was stationed in Northern Ireland in 1947 when his English wife, Priscilla, gave birth to a son. The family moved to New Zealand when the boy, christened Nigel, was seven. He was shy and initially struggled to fit in to his new homeland. Being teased for his posh accent didn’t help and he developed a stutter. At about age 10, the boy changed his “unfair handicap” of a name to Sam and, by the time he started boarding at Christ’s College, Christchurch, he’d found his calling, appearing in more than eight plays throughout high school. In 1977, director Roger Donaldson cast him in his first film, Sleeping Dogs, and Sam Neill was on his way to becoming the country’s first international movie star.
He bought his first parcel of land in 1993, the year he became a household name with roles in the game-changing CGI spectacle Jurassic Park and Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning The Piano. “I grew up in Dunedin but Central Otago was where we used to go on holidays as kids — skiing, camping, fishing,” Neill says. “Then when my career started to sort of turn into something I realised I had enough money to buy some land and build a house there.” Six months later, he planted his first vines of pinot noir, a grape so flavourful and yet so temperamental that it inspired a Paul Giamatti soliloquy in the 2004 Oscar-winner Sideways. “They don’t call it the heartbreak grape for nothing,” Neill says. “But the idea we could grow something like Burgundy down the road from where I’d built my house was intoxicating.” His eyes crinkle, bringing his whole face in on the joke: “Literally intoxicating.”
Neill is separated from his second wife, makeup artist Noriko Watanabe, with whom he has a daughter. He has three other children and four grandsons, a couple of whom have done holiday work on the farm. Since late last year, he has been dating veteran Australian political journalist Laura Tingle and the couple’s spirited banter, which blossomed into life on Twitter, remains robust. At one point, Neill whips out a smartphone and snaps a photo of the bacchanalian spread. “I’ll title it ‘Working lunch’,” he chuckles, pressing send. “She’s going to be so annoyed. Working lunch!”
Hard to begrudge Neill a little mid-week indulgence during this brief hiatus before he starts work on two more (as yet unannounced) films, one in England, one in Western Australia. (He plays coy when asked about a rumoured return to the dinosaur franchise for Jurassic World 3: “I haven’t said yes and I haven’t said no because I haven’t been asked. There, I’ve given you the Julie Bishop answer.”) Neill estimates he’s shot about 80 feature films since his 1977 debut, most recently Rachel Griffiths’ directing debut Ride Like a Girl, in which he plays the father of Melbourne Cup-winning jockey Michelle Payne, and Rachel Ward’s Palm Beach with her husband, Neill’s long-time friend and frequent co-star Bryan Brown. “Bryan’s probably my closest friend,” he says. “It probably speaks of my immense tolerance and compassion, you know. As for Bryan, I think it’s a privilege for him …” [pause, chuckle] “to have a friend at all.” It’s the kind of jovial sledging familiar to anyone who’s attended one of the pair’s rambunctious joint birthday parties, held to celebrate the turn of each decade and featuring a now-traditional game of cultural one-upmanship: Neill counters Brown’s inclusion of an Aboriginal welcome to country by bringing in a traditional Maori haka group.
Presumably there’s an option for Neill to shelve acting and spend his days on the farm? “I could, yes, and I’d probably be entirely content,” he says. “But there’s still something in me that wants to put a few more runs on the board. Also, I’m very happy in solitude but I prefer company. One of the great rewards of working in film is that there’s always good company, there are always actors who are funny as buggery and erudite sound people. There’s always good company to be had.”
Time drags us onward. The stemware is multiplying and Neill introduces “pernot” into the conversation. It’s not a real word, just the accidental, late-afternoon merging of pinot and merlot. “I should pronounce that better,” he says. Heh heh. It’s all Addy’s fault. With zero prompting, he’s brought out a 2009 Penfolds Grange, a single glass of which costs as much as the average weekly grocery bill. Caught up in the swirling vortex of goodwill and wine talk, Addy’s gone and left the bottle. “These days — working lunches aside — I don’t really drink during the week and I don’t miss it either,” Neill hastens to point out. “So it’s only weekends.” He starts on the story of a six-month period in which he went on the wagon. He’d hit the wall filming the BBC drama Peaky Blinders in Manchester, England, a few years ago. Living alone in a flat. Shopping shamefaced in the “sad aisle” at the supermarket with all the other singles. Shepherd’s pie for one, cooked in the microwave. Something about a bottle of Rioja a night. Heh heh.
Conversation degenerates. Something about Jurassic Park action figures. Helena Bonham Carter giving birth. Wait, the actress or the cow? By now I’m just happy to bask in the deep and rolling cadence of his voice. A sleeve goes up, revealing a tattoo on his right forearm. It’s a spiral Maori symbol recently inked by his close friend and Piano co-star, Gordon Toi. It represents Neill’s journey through a remarkable life, from shy Irish transplant to world-famous actor and successful vigneron, a life filled with kids and grandkids and animals and joy. Now he’s talking about biblical kings and the All Blacks. Being constantly confused with Hugo Weaving. The chuckles come in triplicate: heh, heh, heh. There’s something elusive about wine, he’s saying. Elusive but accessible. There are great wines, ordinary wines, wines that are undrinkable. “Like all wonderful things they’re always slightly out of your reach,” he says, before abruptly standing up and excusing himself. “I’m becoming incomprehensible.” The room without Sam Neill in it becomes suddenly quiet and empty, joyless as flat champagne. I contemplate the bottle of Grange: is it half empty or half full? But then he’s back. “I see wine as being integral to good social discourse,” he continues. Heh heh heh. “It’s not essential, but it’s a wonderful additive.”
Great Innovators: The Rise of Australian Wine with Sam Neill, Foxtel’s National Geographic channel, October 18.
Source: The Weekend Australian Magazine
What was your greatest holiday?
Perhaps the time I went to the Isle of Lewis, one of the bleakest places in the world. We were there 31 days, and it rained 30 out of 31 days. But it was a place of unmatched beauty.
And the worst?
The worst holiday I ever had was in Sardinia. It was at a very expensive resort. It was a last-minute booking and it was the only place we could get in to. It was mid-high season and it was up in Silvio Berlusconi territory. I absolutely loathed every minute of it. It was full of the “beautiful people” and I was grumpy for the entire week. I refused to go to the beach until 6.30pm when all the “beautiful people” had buggered off the beach and I’d go for a swim undisturbed. However, one night there was one other couple at the beach and it was Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart. This guy came striding over and said: “Hi Sam, I’m Harrison.” I said, “oh, yes, you are” and he said, “shall we have dinner?” So, we had two or three nights drinking and he was telling stories, and his stories were better than mine and what was easily the worst holiday I’d ever had turned out to be rather good at the end.
If we bump into you on holiday, what are you most likely to be doing?
Avoiding people and I’ll be anywhere but the beach.
If we could teleport you to one place in New Zealand for a week-long holiday, where would it be?
For me, going home to the farm is a holiday. So it’s got to be that. But if you insist on me not going home, I’m going to say Doubtful Sound on a nice boat, with some excellent food and wine and some pleasant, quiet company.
How about for a dream holiday internationally?
I really want to go to Iran and I’m desperate to go to Egypt. I think it’s probably a really good time to go to Egypt because tourism is down. I look forward to going to the Valley of the Kings with a great absence of people from, shall we say, the Northern Hemisphere.
What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done when travelling?
I’ve done it several times, and that is to leave my passport in the safe of the hotel, which means actually going back to the hotel, retrieving the passport, changing your flight and spending a whole day somewhere grim like London Heathrow Airport.
Complete this sentence: I can’t travel without . . . A sleeping pill.
What’s the best travel tip you’ve ever been given?
It’s not a tip I was given, it’s just something I’ve discovered. I’ve discovered that it’s better to go to the places where people are not. There’s no point going to Venice now, you know you’re just going to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of people looking for fridge magnets. But there are less-obvious cities. I love Italy, and less obvious cities like Lucca are just marvellous and there’s not many people there. It’s not that I’m people-phobic, but even in places like Venice, if you take that little alley there and then turn left and turn right again, you can find quiet spaces.
What was the most memorable meal you’ve had while travelling?
I think probably my father’s last great meal. It was in Paris, it was at a restaurant called Lucas Carton, and it’s all changed now but it was a very traditional place and we ate the 10-course degustation menu with matched wines and we got pretty drunk. We ate duck, which was a 2000-year-old Roman recipe, quite the most wonderful thing to eat, and my father relished every, every mouthful. After that he started to get unwell and he had cancer and that was the end of him. But that was his last great meal and I remember it with great affection.
What’s the best thing you’ve brought back from a trip?
Fridge magnets. I’m now an avid collector, the daggier the better, and I bought some on the Uncharted series we’ve just done around the Pacific. I’ve got magnets with bouncy bears from Alaska and hula girls from Hawaii and you name it, the whole Pacific is on my fridge. I’ve also got a really bad one from Istanbul, which is a sort of bridge, I think it’s probably supposed to cross the Bosporus Strait but it looks like you’d fall off it and plummet to your death. It’s a really bad one — the badder the better really. There’s no such thing as a tasteful fridge magnet.
Favourite airport at which to land?
I don’t think there’s any good airport to land at. But taking off could be a good experience with a good lounge and I’m going to say Sydney is the best for lounges.
What’s the next trip you have planned?
I’m going to England to do a movie, so that’s probably my next trip so the next landing will be Heathrow, which is terrible. Sorry to finish on a bum note!
Uncharted with Sam Neill starts Sunday, September 2, at 8.30pm on Prime.
Source: NZ Herald