Sam Neill: The final Listener interview

Sam Neill appeared on the cover of the New Zealand Listener many times thoughout his screen career. He was there again in 2023, with the release of his memoir Have I Told You This?, when he talked frankly about his cancer diagnosis, his peculiar job, his attitude to fame, and his thoughts about death.

Actor, vintner and menagerie keeper Sam Neill begins his memoir with a tale from when his younger daughter, Elena, was an infant at school. “The teacher asked the circle of little children around her, ‘What does your mummy or your daddy do for a job?’

“The little hands went up in the air … My mummy’s a lawyer. My daddy’s an accountant. My mummy builds houses. And so on.

“When it came to Elena, the answer about me was both perceptive and entirely accurate. ‘My daddy sits in caravans.’”

In Did I Ever Tell You This?, our best-known movie star goes on to concede that he’s spent much of his life sitting in film-set caravans (or trailers, as they’re known in the US) waiting for someone to tell him what to do. “When Elena would visit me at work, that is what I would be doing. Sitting in a trailer, in a car park somewhere, having a cuppa, waiting: her daddy at work. It doesn’t sound like a life well lived, does it? At least it’s quiet.”

This is a very Sam Neill story. It says, “Yeah, okay, I’m a bit famous but not all that famous, and really, what a silly life to somehow just fall into.” In other words, any success he’s had has been down more to luck than any great talent.

He is probably mostly a bit famous for having been Dr Alan Grant, and being chased by fearsome dinosaurs in three of the Jurassic Park movies, most recently, last year’s Jurassic World: Dominion. Yes, I can hear that sigh from here, Sam Neill.

There were three possible endings for his memoir. The first was that he died before finishing writing it. The second was that he finished the book and then died. The third was that he would live. It is not giving anything away to say that the third ending is what happened.

He was not at all sure he would live. He was diagnosed with stage three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. At least, that’s what he thinks it was; he’d never heard of it and didn’t look it up. He prefers Stephen Fry’s description: the “whoreson pisser”.

The outlook was bleak; chemotherapy wasn’t working. What saved him was a drug so rare – and, for most people, ruinously expensive – that he was the only person in New South Wales, where he had treatment, who was on it at the time.

He was writing what might have made for a memoir as bleak as his diagnosis. He didn’t, he says, want to write a “cancer book”. He hates cancer books. People keep sending them to him and he would like them to stop. Instead, he has written a funny and sometimes sad and tender memoir populated by eccentrics – mostly members of his family – and the odd film star. In the blurb on the front, Fry describes it as “fabulously entertaining” and “insanely readable”.

There are a few drunken antics, plenty of parties, not much gossip. He does not do snide, except occasionally when it comes to politicians, mostly of the right-wing ilk. Like most actors, he is an old leftie.

He is a bit rude about a few people, including a fellow old leftie – former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, who was invited to a party put on by Meryl Streep and behaved like a “boorish wanker”, says Neill, who was at the bash.

Being boorish or being a bore are cardinal sins. Charlton Heston, a gun nut and head of the National Rifle Association of America for five years, was, he says, a dangerous man but also boring – which was worse than being dangerous. He mostly likes people and he likes meeting people. Of course, he meets lots of interesting and clever people.

There is no point in complimenting him on his memoir. I tried. He shakes off compliments like a dog that has been out in the rain. He wrote it, he thinks, mostly for himself. He was too ill to work. He was living, or doing what just about passed for living, alone in his Sydney apartment. He needed something to do, perhaps to take his mind off what appeared to be impending death.

He had, and has, by the way, no fear of dying, although he’d rather be alive. “I’d prefer to live. It’s more interesting, I think, than whatever happens next. I don’t believe in an afterlife, certainly not one with angels and harps. I do believe, I know, that you become quite literally part of the universe.”

He mucks about with his menagerie of pigs, ducks and various other creatures. He names his animals after his famous film-star mates. There is a chicken called Laura Dern. He is particularly enamoured of Angelica, the enormous kunekune pig he adopted 15 years ago. Angelica is a boy pig. He recently got him a girlfriend called Bryan. He writes that Angelica is not transitioning. Writing that will get him into hot water, I tell him.

“That was a joke!” Yes, I got it. “I don’t think we should take everything so seriously. Everybody’s so sensitive about everything. And boy, the recriminations for the mildest of things are just weird and very troubling.”

He writes that he and Angelica resemble each other more and more as they get older. “We are both grumpy, ugly, white-whiskered, and enjoy a good back scratch.”

This is rot, of course. He’s very good looking, although he can’t take any credit for that accident of genetics. His appalling Aunt Jummy once said to him, “Your father … now he was a handsome man.”

He says Angelica is “ahead of me now because he’s got a companion”. Neill was married to Noriko Watanabe for almost 30 years. He has since had a few girlfriends. He has ended up, at the age of 75, as “a crusty old bachelor. I’m not sure if that speaks of the number of failures or if it’s just that that’s how life pans out.”

Does he mind? “Well, I did mind. There were times last year when I thought, ‘Why am I so solitary?’ I would have liked someone to hold my hand once in a while. I’ve only got myself to blame.”

He says he was a dickhead. He writes that he is friends with only one of his exes. He doesn’t expand on the ways in which he was a dickhead but there is obviously regret.

It is hard to imagine him behaving regretfully. He has such beautiful manners. He believes in manners, an old-fashioned concept, he concedes. “I was brought up with manners. I think we probably need to revive the idea,” he says, particularly when the “Trumps of this world have normalised abuse and bad manners”.

His good manners do not prevent him from including in his memoir explosive depictions of various evacuations of the bowels, or what he calls “the annual purge” on the occasions of his yearly colonoscopy. Or of his desire to do “an enormous fart” due to the side effects of the morphine he was on during his treatment. I suppose he is a farmer, and farmers have an intimate relationship with poop and an earthy sense of humour.

He was born in Omagh, in Northern Ireland, in 1947, on the kitchen table. He doesn’t know why. His father, a New Zealander, was an army officer stationed in Ireland. He sounded more posh English than the poshest of the English. His mother was English, pretty, no nonsense. They emigrated to New Zealand in 1954 and his father joined the family’s liquor business.

He adored his parents, and years after their deaths, adores them still. He has only one complaint against them – they named him Nigel. He changed it to Sam while at school.

His first “performative” bit of acting was to play a New Zealander, which involved losing his plummy English accent along with the dreaded Nigel. The name was too wet and “effete” for the robust environment that was a New Zealand playground. Sam conjures a friendly labrador, he says.

He also adored his Granny Gaggie, from whom he inherited his love of all animals. Gaggie had a pet crow she had rescued as a fledgling and a hugely fat Corgi she would put in an ancient pram and take to the shops.

Many years later, such eccentricities would inform his art. In Dean Spanley, he plays a clergyman who, in a previous incarnation, was a canine. He writes: “His inner dog is never very far from the surface. All it takes is for a very fine glass of tokay and he’s away, barking.

“We often talk about the inner life of the characters we play, but this was next level.” Neill loves that film.

He has a contagiously silly sense of fun and is very good at laughing at himself, although you do sometimes groan at the depths of self-deprecation into which he frequently and happily lowers himself. “Look, I don’t think I’m particularly self-deprecating, but I don’t go around with a trumpet strapped to my chest.” Sir Edmund Hillary didn’t come down from Mt Everest with a trumpet strapped to his chest. “He said, ‘We knocked the bastard off.’ Hillary set the bar for not being up yourself.”

Neill resisted being a Sir for many years after the John Key-led government reinstated knighthoods, which had been canned in Helen Clark’s time. He was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007 but finally accepted a change to knight companion last year. He’d resisted in part because being a Sir was too grand and he anticipated the stick he’d get from his mates. He changed his mind, he says, because he thought accepting the honour might send a signal that the arts, and actors, matter.

Grand Sirs don’t hang out their own socks. In the book, he tells a story about missing a call from his agent, calling him back and saying, “Sorry I didn’t pick up the first time, I was hanging out my laundry.” His agent was horrified. “You do your own laundry? Oh … my … God!”

He is famous enough, without the burden of being really famous. “Obviously, I have friends who are celebrities. And I think, by and large, they enjoy it. Fame, sponsorships, great frocks … there are many benefits that go with being a celebrity. It also pays off in your day job: if you’re famous, you get paid more. I myself have never wanted any of that, were it on offer. The intrusiveness, the complete loss of privacy – at what cost?

“Having a life that’s private is, frankly, priceless. I can walk on pretty much any street in the world without being bothered. These friends of mine, however, need security, a getaway car – there’s no end to it.

“I am not a celebrity. When I was coming out of my coffee joint the other day, a bloke yelled at me, ‘I know you. You’re on television. What’s your name?’

“‘I’m Hugo Weaving’, I replied. He seemed satisfied with that and wandered away. I couldn’t just leave it at that. I yelled, ‘I’m also a shit actor.’ A complete falsehood by the way, but it made my morning.”

The most film-starry thing he has ever done, and which he writes about with cringemaking frankness, was to buy a shiny black Porsche 911. This was in 1983, when he was making Reilly, Ace of Spies and had some silly money for the first time.

He loved the car but there was a problem: he felt like a wanker driving it. He would leave his flat, check that nobody he knew was lurking nearby, “then jump in and roar off before anyone spotted me”.

He was rumbled. While idling at a red light, he saw to his horror the actor Judy Davis – they had been in My Brilliant Career together – on the footpath.

“I silently prayed to God that she wouldn’t see me in this absurd car. But no, she strode straight over to the passenger window, rapped on it and stuck her head into the car. ‘No, Sam,’ she said. ‘Not you, Sam, not you.’

“The next day, I drove down the Fulham Road and did a deal on a rather staid BMW 5, invariably their dullest line.”

Along with his perfect manners, he has lashings of charm. His is so understated as to render it even more charming. He is also “as shallow as a puddle”.

I asked who was the most charming person he’d met, and he said, “My father was very charming. Stephen Fry is a very charming man.”

Germaine Greer was charmless. But she makes for a really excellent story. He met her at a party where the hostess presented him to her like this: “‘Germaine, darling, you must come [and] meet our darling Sam. Isn’t he just adorable?’

“Greer took a drag on a cigarette and looked me coolly up and down. Finally, she blew out some smoke and [said] ‘Well, I wouldn’t f--- him,’ … turning on her heel and walking away into the party.”

He met the late Queen, who, he says, had real charm. Her husband had “no charm whatsoever. But she more than made up for it. She was delightful.”

He’s all right, too. That’ll do for a compliment he might not shake off. I am very glad that he didn’t cark it, but not, obviously, as glad as he is.

He got to finish his book, and this is how the just-a-bit-famous film guy from those dinosaur movies ends it. He is playing Charles II in the 1995 film Restoration.

“A dream part, like a pavlova cake, and I consumed it with gusto … Waistcoats galore, enormous hats sporting ostrich feathers, blooming breeches, thigh-high boots, moustaches, spaniels, you name it. I looked so fabulous, I hardly needed to act … You cannot imagine how resplendent I was.

“I was sitting in my trailer when the word came that my family had arrived. I ensured that I was fully kitted out to make the maximum impression. I particularly wanted to wow Elena, who was about four or five then.

“There came a knock on the trailer door. I flung it open; my hat could hardly fit through the door let alone the rest of my sumptuous costume.

“She looked baffled. ‘Daddy, where are the dinosaurs?’ Sigh.