He is one of the world’s best actors – but can still go to Starbucks without anyone recognising him. He discusses cancer, remission, happiness, fame and video nasties
Sam Neill, 76, is speaking to me via Zoom from Vancouver, where he is filming Untamed, a new Netflix series. We’re here, though, to discuss the new season of The Twelve, a pacy Australian courtroom drama in which Neill plays barrister Brett Colby SC. It’s a heightened murder mystery and subtle social commentary, and “the second series is considerably stronger than the first”, he says, rightly and also surprisingly, because it’s a little bit like saying the first season wasn’t very good. But then, he’s done enough time in this business that he’s allowed to say what he likes, within reason.
For instance, he doesn’t especially like the modern blockbuster: “Now we’re in the age of Marvel action films, people destroying entire cities on a whim, they’re not particularly interesting to me.” (But that didn’t stop him making cameos in the two most recent Thor films, directed by fellow New Zealander Taika Waititi.) Or that “the great years of cinema were the 50s through to the 70s”, which is, again, surprising, since in a career spanning 45 years, the golden age tapped out (according to him) after his fourth film in 1979, My Brilliant Career. This was an absolutely epochal feminist masterpiece, which anyone of a certain vintage – 50 – will remember because of how many times their mum made them watch it. “It was a film about women, made by women, and that was almost unheard of then. And rare enough today,” he says. If you run the numbers, how many female antipodean directors made it big in the 20th century, and how many cast Neill as their leading man, you come back with “both of them” (Gillian Armstrong and, of course, Jane Campion with The Piano, in 1993). When feminists all (both) like the same guy, it’s usually because he’s not a dick.
