I interviewed Sam Neill in 2024. He was more charming than I expected | Sam Neill

I He interviewed Sam Neill in 2024, remotely: He was in Vancouver filming the Netflix series Untamed, but we were there to talk about a twisty Australian courtroom drama, The Twelve. He was immediately honest. He said his second season was “much stronger” than the first, which was absolutely true, as the first was a bit corny, and the second showed more confidence in its audience and our tolerance for nuance.

But actors, in general, will never say anything remotely critical of a project, it’s just not worth it. This could make even the most reflective of them seem haunted, and the feeling of being in conversation with a real 3D human was unfamiliar and warm.

He was a fairly open person anyway, by reputation, and charismatically self-deprecating. But he recently underwent treatment for autoimmune T-cell lymphoma, which prompted him to write his memoirs and gave him a new, bullshit-free perspective.

He described himself as an ‘idle man’, which I immediately challenged, just through his work – he had a very successful decade in the late ’80s and early ’90s, with Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, and Jurassic Park of course, but that was on the heels of an artistic period in the late ’70s, which provided My Brilliant Career, an absolutely magnetic film about women’s liberation, and 1981’s Great Mental Possession.

“No, I seem to be working a lot, but basically I’m inactive.” He disappeared from Zoom to find a copy of his book, Have I Ever Told You This? And he came back with another book entirely, Question 7 by Richard Flanagan. “If I had been a man of a little more depth, or any depth, and had not written my book in haste, had it not been for these two things—but haste was a necessity—and if I had had a greater mind, I should have written this.”

“Never mind my book, this one is better” summed up his working style: boyish, generous, self-aware (he was right too – Question 7 is great).

His first feature film, Sleeping Dogs (1976), was the first film from New Zealand to be released in the United States, and he did not become a full-time actor until he was thirty. Dead Calm launched him and Nicole Kidman into international fame, but Neil never wanted to move to Hollywood, and the longest he worked in Los Angeles was a year and a half. He felt it was not the place to raise children: he is survived by his son with actress Lisa Haro – Tim, born in 1983 – and his daughter Elena, born in 1991, with make-up artist Noriko Watanabe.

But Los Angeles wasn’t a place for adults either. “There’s been nothing but show business. No other conversations, no other interests. It’s too boring for me. That’s why my life is now half performance and half country. I farm, I grow wine, and it keeps me sane. If I did just one thing, I’d go absolutely crazy.”

“The Piano” may have been his independent film that made the biggest impact, but it was “Possession” that he was proudest of and the first film he would revisit in his memory, somewhere between art, horror and action, “very Polish and very brave, and Isabelle Adjani is amazing in it. I’ve been asked to go places I’ve never been asked to go before, and certainly not since.”

By the time his memoirs were published, his cancer treatment had ended, and its main residue was an absolute, nonchalant honesty — that action movies were stupid, and that the golden age of cinema was the 1950s to 1970s. But he was not exhausted by any means, and he worked all the time. “Maybe too much,” he told me, “but that’s because I enjoy it so much. The idea of ​​not working fills me with fear. Some of it has to do with coming from a small place, the most obscure place in the world, far away from anything you could possibly get, and being asked to do something with an international dimension. How very tempting is that?”