It was 1993, and Sam Neill wasn’t yet internationally famous – which is exactly what Steven Spielberg was looking for. He was about to direct Jurassic Park, and needed a relative unknown for the lead as he’d already blown most of his budget on dinosaur effects.
To film buffs, Neill – who has died, aged 78 – was far from unknown; he’d been acting solidly for 15 years, ever since his breakout role in New Zealand action thriller Sleeping Dogs (1977), with roles including the adult Damien in the third Omen film The Final Conflict and as Isabelle Adjani’s cuckolded husband in Possession (both 1981).
After Harrison Ford and William Hurt rejected the role of irritable paleontologist Dr Alan Grant, Spielberg considered Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss – but they were dismissed as too expensive. “I wanted a good, solid actor who wasn’t going to charge outrageous prices,” the director once said. He settled on Neill, who had fortunately become available.
The actor’s effectiveness as a heroic lead had been proven more than 10 years before, playing the gentlemanly Harry Beecham in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), and he could play stern like the best of them (Enigma, 1982; The Hunt for Red October, 1990; The Piano, 1993). Both attributes were required for Jurassic Park; his casting was a masterstroke – Neill’s reaction shot to seeing a dinosaur for the first time, his grizzled exterior transforming to childlike awe as John Williams’s theme plays, is one of Spielberg’s greatest moments.
Neill once recalled about filming the scene: “Steven said, ‘Look over there and imagine there’s a whole plain of grazing dinosaurs of all different stripes and persuasions – how would you feel about that?’ And I said, ‘Oh s***, I don’t know Steven, I think I’d faint.” That’s why my knees go in the shot.”
Jurassic Park was a blockbuster hit upon release, earning $1.058bn (£789.47m) to become the highest-grossing film of all time in 1993. (It retained that title until James Cameron’s Titanic four years later.) And it introduced Neill to international audiences, drastically raising his Hollywood capital.
While Neill looked back on Jurassic Park fondly, he had one niggle with his performance: his accent, which he said he “got a lot of flak” for over the years.
Neill had a few months to prepare for Jurassic before he was due on the movie’s Hawaii set, and it was enough time to perfect an American accent – unfortunately, Spielberg instructed him on the first day of shooting to ditch it in favour of his own New Zealand voice.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
“He came up to me halfway through the day, and he said, ‘Hey, Sam, you know the accent we were talking about?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been working on it for four weeks.…’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, just use your own voice,’” Neill told Vanity Fair.
“I said, ‘That’s great, Steven, thank you so much.’ And then four days later, he came up to me and said, ‘You know that voice you’re using now?’ I said, ‘Yeah, my voice?’ He said, ‘Somewhere in between.’ It’s an actor’s nightmare!”
He was also left with a lasting memory of the film, thanks to a big scar on his left hand caused by the flare his character used to distract the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“It dropped some burning phosphorous on me and got under my watch and took a chunk of my arm out,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
He also once recalled being fortunate to escape the film with his life due to a hurricane that hit the island of Kauai, where it was being made.
Neill had to hole up in a hotel ballroom with Spielberg and his co-stars, including Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough, while the hurricane raged outside. When a fearful Dern asked him if they were going to die, he told her, “Yes, I think we might, Laura.” Six people died in the hurricane, which destroyed the film’s sets – and footage caught during the storm can be seen in the finished film.
Neill was surprised at the longevity of the franchise, which has six films in total to date. He himself returned in Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022).
“I never imagined that the first film would, in particular, make a place for itself so much in popular. People can quote the lines. Alan Grant taking off his dark glasses to see things has become a meme. You just do them at the time, and then 30 years later, it’s still part of people’s lives. It’s baffling, really.”
By his own admission, Neill got stopped on the street for many different projects – but Jurassic Park was “the most universal of them all”.
“If I go to the Philippines or Rwanda or something, people just know me all around the world – and they’ll start roaring like dinosaurs,” he said.