Two weeks ago I sat in the front row of the BFI IMAX and watched a palaeontologist go weak at the knees over a brachiosaur. The film was Jurassic Park, screened for London Climate Week by The Wildlife Trusts, and before the lights dropped, Craig Bennett – Chief Executive of The Wildlife Trusts – made the point that we perhaps could never have imagined at its inception: the film is thirty-three years old, and its science fiction has quietly become science. De-extinction is no longer a plot device. It is a funding round.
I did not expect, a fortnight later, to be writing about the man who played that palaeontologist because he had gone.
Sam Neill died on Monday in Sydney, aged 78. His family called it sudden and unexpected, and were careful to say he remained cancer free — he had beaten the rare blood cancer he was diagnosed with in 2022, and announced as much only that spring. That is the cruelty of it. Many of us had let ourselves believe we would be seeing a great deal more of him.
I’d like to pay my respects the way this blog knows how: by noting that Sam Neill spent an extraordinary amount of his career standing next to monsters, and that almost nobody did it better.
Dr Alan Grant, and the wonder that curdles
Let’s start where most of us did. Every kid who grew up in the eighties had a dinosaur phase; Alan Grant showed up and quietly extended ours by another thirty-odd years. He was Indiana Jones with a rock hammer — a palaeontologist who would rather be knee-deep in a Montana dig than anywhere near people, least of all children. One can sympathise. What Neill understood about the part was that the wonder and the wariness are the same muscle. Watch the sauropod scene: the open-mouthed awe of a man who has spent his life with the dead and is suddenly handed the living. He recaptures this beautifully, despite all the danger via dinosaurs his character has been exposed to by then, when he spots the dreadnoughtus in Jurassic World: Dominion. But also watch how quickly that awe learns to be afraid. By the end he will not endorse the park, and he has become, almost against his will, the fierce protector of two frightened children.
The film’s explicit sermon on hubris belongs to Ian Malcolm — the line about scientists being so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to ask whether they should, which I have leaned on myself when writing about resurrected wolves. But Grant is its conscience in a quieter register: the scientist who looks at the miracle and says, gently, that some things are not ours to command. Neill played that not as a lecture but as a kind of grief.
When the fiction walked out of the cinema
Which brings us back to that IMAX introduction. In 2025 a Texas company, Colossal Biosciences, announced it had “brought back” the dire wolf — a claim I picked apart at length elsewhere, because what they had actually made was a gene-edited grey wolf in a very good marketing coat. The dodo, the thylacine and the mammoth are all on their stated to-do list. Grant’s fictional dilemma has become a real one, and we are all extras in it now.
The Hunter, and a guide you cannot trust
Here is where I had meant to cast Neill as the wise voice steering a hunter towards mercy — and where the film politely refuses to let me.
In The Hunter (2011), Willem Dafoe plays a mercenary sent to Tasmania by a biotech firm to find the last thylacine and take its DNA, killing any others so that no rival can have them. Neill plays Jack Mindy, the local who meets him off the plane and shows him the country — and who turns out to be a man with rather too many secrets and divided loyalties, closer to the fire that guts the film’s grieving family than to its conscience. It is Dafoe’s hunter, not Neill’s guide, who finds the moral centre, and he finds it the hard way.
I think that is the better note anyway. Mindy is a wonderfully compromised piece of work — friendly, helpful, and quietly on the wrong side — and the film’s real argument is that when the last of a kind is at stake, nobody’s hands stay clean. The thylacine Dafoe hunts was formally declared extinct in 1986; it is now, uncannily, a resurrection candidate. The monster and the man have swapped places, and Neill is right there in the middle of it.
The wider bestiary
Grant may be the headline, but Neill kept unlikely company for decades. He was the grown Antichrist in Omen III: The Final Conflict. He lost his mind aboard a very haunted spaceship in Event Horizon and inside a Lovecraftian small town in In the Mouth of Madness. He shared the sea with a killer in Dead Calm and something far worse in Possession. Time and again he was cast as the sane, civilised man at the threshold of the unspeakable — and he lent those films a gravity they had no right to expect, never once looking down his nose at the genre paying his wages.
The man himself
Neill was born in Northern Ireland in 1947 and raised in New Zealand from the age of seven, and for all the Hollywood years he never really left the land. He kept a Central Otago vineyard and a farm full of ducks, pigs and cattle that he introduced to the internet, by name, during lockdown, to the delight of several million strangers. Offered a knighthood, he waved the title away as far too grand, though he quietly accepted the honour in 2022.
And he was, by every account, a deeply kind man. In 2024 he appeared on the ABC series The Assembly, interviewed by a room of autistic journalism students, and a young woman named Abby asked him the best lesson his parents had taught him. He stopped. He teared up, admitting he could not quite say why the question had floored him, before landing on his mother’s very undramatic wisdom: that sometimes you simply have to pull yourself together. It went round the world because it was so plainly unperformed.
He spoke about his illness the same way — without self-pity, and with a line I keep coming back to. He was not frightened of dying, he said; he would just find it “very irritating”, because there were things he still wanted to do.
There were. There would have been more. Thirty-three years on from that first sauropod, the beautiful, terrible animals he stood beside are climbing out of the past and into our laboratories — and it feels right that the man who taught a generation to look at them with equal parts hunger and caution should get the last, quiet word.
Rest well, Sam. Try not to be too irritated.
The blog of author Luke Phillips 