‘Make wine and share it. What more could you want?’: Sam Neill is remembered by his co-stars | Sam Neill

“A wonderful man and a wonderful actor”

Lindsay Duncan, co-starring in Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983) and Blackbird (2019)

I worked with Sam on Reilly when I was young and shy, and even though he pinned me to a desk in one scene, I didn’t get the most out of the experience. Then a few years ago we shot a movie called Blackbird, directed by Roger Michell, with an amazing group of actors and we all became close together. Sam was a great guy. He was a great actor. He was warm and funny. He listened when I spoke. He made and shared wine. What more do you want from a man?

When Sam was going through a very difficult stage of treatment, he…
The blackbird group decided he needed encouragement. After a lot of deep thought from all of us and the exchange of many funny pictures, Mia Wasikowska ordered a cake from a friend of hers which was a pig and a sheep engaged in an intimate act, with a bottle of Two Paddocks next to them, on the side. Just a few things I love, in one cake. We all have little black bird tattoos, so this will go with it.

“Untainted by basic ambition”

Charles Dance, co-starring in The Plenty (1985), To the Ends of the Earth (2005), and Then There Were None (2015)

In an industry full of questionable people, Sam was one of the good guys. He was a wonderful, simple actor with tremendous charm and was also incredibly handsome. I always had the impression that he was really balanced. There must have been occasions when he felt anxious, insecure, and paranoid, but it was never apparent. He was just a very cool guy.

Sam was always more concerned with the quality of the wine than any awards for acting. When we finished filming And Then There Were None, he gave us all some very good pinot noir from his winery, which he was very proud of. Between jobs, he would disappear back to New Zealand. He wasn’t tainted by the kind of basic ambition prevalent in our industry – but he wasn’t complacent. He took life as it came.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, and he thought he might only have six months, I sent him an email saying, ‘Good luck Sam, come on, you can get through this.’ He responded by saying, “Great to hear from you, my friend!” With him, what you saw is what you got. I think that was one of the reasons he inspired so much affection.

In this work, each of us – no matter how much we deny it – has public and private faces. Sam had the same face in both places. I really wish I could spend more time with him, because the little time I had with him was so rewarding.

“He was fascinated by the cytotoxic venom of the puffer snake.”

Peter Weber, director of Tutankhamun (2016)

I first wanted to cast Sam because of Andrzej Żuławski’s wonderfully creepy film Possession, in which he starred opposite Isabelle Adjani. This performance—strange, exaggerated operatic yet deeply disturbing, obsessive, and damaged—stayed with me for years. I finally got to work with him on a TV series in South Africa, and spent the rest of the shoot telling him stories between takes. He had a good sense of comedy, and although he was a complex man, he was no great or a star. There is no ego in the group. No fuss. Just work. And a wicked sense of humour.

The temperature reached nearly 50 degrees at Vioolsdrift, on the border with Namibia, but Sam enjoyed the challenge and never indulged in the tantrums and starry-eyed nonsense you sometimes find in actors of his age and experience. He was playing the English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon: he extracted the humor from the character, finding light and shadow where it wasn’t always apparent on the page.

It was a long filming process in sometimes difficult conditions – sandstorms, scorpions, poisonous spiders and the occasional blow snake. Sam was fascinated by these snakes and the danger of their bite, which he described with absolute relish. The venom of the puff viper is cytotoxic – it dissolves tissue. The flesh dies and sloughs off, sometimes even the bones. You can develop necrotizing fasciitis of all things—a flesh-eating disease—that requires multiple surgeries to cut out the dead tissue. Sam would tell all this at length, over dinner, with the kind of joy most people reserve for describing good wine, and then he would pause, take a sip of his own, and say something like, “Anyway, beautiful sunset tonight.”

It was very lively, Sam. Proud of his New Zealand roots and the vineyard he owns there, which he talked about the way other actors talk about their craft – with genuine love and absolutely no pretension.

It can also be horror. We moved the shoot to Cape Town, which is a more relaxing area, but a bit boring after the madness of the desert. Sam relieved the tedium of the daily photography and dialogue pages with a series of increasingly complex practical jokes. He convinced a poor young actor that the scene required a large amount of cake on top. Fair enough. I believed him. After twenty shots – wide, medium and close – the poor woman was still putting spoon after spoon in her mouth. Watering eyes. Cheeks like a hamster. The whole crew was in it by taking three. Sam never cracked. That was his thing – he could put on a straight, dead face while someone two feet away was slowly sinking into the sponge cake. I only realized it when I caught us all trying not to laugh. Even then, Sam seemed genuinely confused as to what the problem was.

You kept your guard up around him. He was always preparing something calmly and patiently. But it was never cruel. He was generous. He made everyone on set feel like they were in on the joke, even when they were the joke.

Good actor. A finer man. I will miss him.