I interviewed Sam Neill in 2024. He was even more charming than I’d expected | Zoe Williams
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- Zoe Williams interviewed Sam Neill remotely in 2024 while he was in Vancouver filming the Netflix series Untamed, originally to discuss his Australian courtroom drama The Twelve
- Neill called the second season of The Twelve "considerably stronger" than the first, and Williams notes the conversation stood out for its "three-dimensional human" quality, unusual candor for an actor
- His recent treatment for angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma had spurred the memoir Did I Ever Tell You This? and left him, in his words, with "an absolute and nonchalant truthfulness"
- His career spanned arthouse (Sleeping Dogs in 1976, My Brilliant Career, Possession in 1981) to blockbusters (Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Jurassic Park), with Possession the film he was "proudest of"
- Neill deliberately split his time "half-performance and half-rural," farming and making wine in New Zealand; his longest stretch in Hollywood was just 18 months because, he said, "there was nothing but show business"
- He is survived by son Tim, born 1983 to actress Lisa Harrow, and daughter Elena, born 1991 to makeup artist Noriko Watanabe
- At a moment of his choosing during the Zoom call, Neill abandoned his own memoir on camera to champion Richard Flanagan's Question 7 instead — "Never mind my book, this book is better"
Why it matters: Obituary coverage across outlets (Guardian, BBC, IndieWire) will foreground Neill's blockbuster roles and his death at 78; this column, grounded in a 2024 conversation, offers the texture most tributes will miss — his disdain for Hollywood as a place of "no other conversations," his chosen rural winemaking life, and the disarmingly candid, post-cancer philosophy that shaped his final years of work.
