“Uh … it’s … it’s a dinosaur!”
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Universal Pictures/Getty Images; NBC; Wim Wenders Stiftung; New Line Cinema/Getty Images
Film and TV fans around the world grieve the loss of Sam Neill this week. Neill was a performer whose bone-deep decency shone through his work and was amplified in later years by a social-media presence that featured him reminiscing about his career or hanging out with animals on his farm, or maybe cuddling a duck. Neill was a vocal activist for the environment and Aboriginal rights, and he was also the kind of performer who could look as comfortable in a blockbuster as he could in a micro-budget indie. Picking just 17 performances (across a dozen films and five TV appearances) from his half-century career was remarkably difficult, but the list below reveals the breadth of his underrated ability. He could act his way through anything.
Note: Unless noted, these films are also available for VOD rental costs around $4 to $5, but we’re highlighting the option that’s free to subscribers of that service
Sam Neill’s breakthrough role was also the breakthrough for an entire country’s film industry. Neill starred in Sleeping Dogs, credited as the first feature-length 35-mm. film produced entirely in New Zealand. Directed by Roger Donaldson (also making his debut), Sleeping Dogsoffers a new angle on the political paranoia thrillers of the mid- to late-’70s, telling a story of a man in a near-future as a fascist government takes over his country. As he ends up stuck between the resistance and the powers that be, Neill delivers the kind of immediately engaging performance that makes it obvious that his place was in front of the camera. ➽ On Kanopy.
If the success of Sleeping Dogs piqued an interest in his talent, this is the drama that really fulfilled his potential almost immediately. As he often would throughout his career, Neill collaborated with a filmmaker he found artistically inspiring, in this case the phenomenal Gillian Armstrong. Neill is wonderfully charming in the story of a young woman (Judy Davis) who wants to be a writer in 19th-century Australia, a time and place in which women didn’t do such things. Nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, it also won the Australian equivalent of the Oscar for Best Film, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. ➽ On HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
Skipping The Omen III: The Final Conflict (which you really should skip), this masterpiece is the one that established Sam Neill’s presence as a key performer in the horror genre, one he would distinguish himself in more than once, although arguably never more than here. Neill plays Mark in director Andrzej Żuławski’s fearless study of madness, opposite the incredible Isabelle Adjani as his increasingly disturbed wife, Anna. Dismissed on its release, Possession has become recognized as one of the essential horror films of its era, acclaimed largely for its direction and Adjani’s frenzied performance — two elements that wouldn’t work without Neill’s grounding presence. ➽ On Philo and AMC+.
This is where most lists would probably have A Cry in the Dark (a.k.a. Evil Angels), given its international success as an Oscar-nominated film for Meryl Streep, but that’s more her vehicle (even if Neill is very good in a supporting role). The late-’80s Neill flick that you really want to track down in this Philip Noyce thriller, a tense three-character piece that features one of the actor’s best performances. Neill stars alongside Nicole Kidman as one-half of a grieving couple who are sailing near the Great Barrier Reef when they stumble upon a man (Billy Zane) who has been shipwrecked. They take him aboard, but everything is not as it seems. Neill is great at balancing the aggro energy of Zane with his intellectual, compassionate style. ➽ On Kanopy.
There are so many famous faces — Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, James Earl Jones, to name a few — in this first and still-best Jack Ryan flick that it’s almost easy to forget that it’s also a Sam Neill movie. But Neill never concerned himself with standing out, instead lending veracity to every scene he’s in for director John McTiernan. As Vasily Borodin, executive officer of the Red October, Neill brings gravitas and gentle truth to a submarine thriller that otherwise can feel a little showy. ➽ On Paramount+.
Where does one even begin describing Wim Wenders’s much-maligned ’90s epic? Or the role Sam Neill plays in this tapestry of a film? You should know that if you’re going to check out this mesmerizing road movie about the lengths that individuals will go to ahead of a world-threatening nuclear disaster, you need to see the director’s cut currently on Criterion Channel. It may be just shy of five hours long, but it’s the vastly superior version of a film that you can’t really put into words. Just experience it. ➽ On the Criterion Channel.
No one needs to explain to anyone with access to the internet what Jurassic Park meant to blockbuster cinema. It’s a franchise that endures to this day. We’ll just add that the movies don’t work without the three original actors at the center — Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. Spielberg knew he had to cast three people we could believe were blindingly smart, but also that we’d root for as heroes. Think about how much worse Jurassic Park would have been with “traditional” hero leads instead of this trio led by Neill. Part of his charm here included playing the stalwart father figure to two terrified kids — someone a child could trust to stick around and keep watch all night when the dinosaurs came chomping. Also, has there ever been a better reaction shot than this one? ➽ On VOD.
The one-two punch of Spielberg and Jane Campion’s films in the same year made Neill’s range readily apparent to wide audiences. Campion’s ’90s masterpiece won the Palme d’Or on its way to three Oscars: one for Campion’s screenplay and a pair for stars Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin. Hunter plays a Scottish woman set up in an arranged marriage with a New Zealand settler, played perfectly by Neill. On the one hand, Neill’s role is that of the “other guy,” the husband who doesn’t understand his new wife’s needs, but he imbues him with such truth that his increasing villainy as the story progresses hits even harder. It’s a film with such unforgettable performances that his work in it often gets overlooked, but it shouldn’t. ➽ Unavailable, but the DVD and Blu-ray can be purchased online.
Many horror directors have tried to make movies inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, but few have captured that author’s vision as much as John Carpenter did in one of his last great films. Neill plays an insurance investigator named John Trent, who visits a small town to find a missing horror novelist. Did the novelist actually find a way to bring real horrors into the world? Neill does again what he did so many times in his career: making the impossible feel real. He gave consistently unshowy performances, bringing the terrifying world of Carpenter’s vision down to earth and making it so much more frightening in the process. ➽ On Hoopla, Tubi, and the Roku Channel.
You could do a thematic double feature with Madness and this Paul W.S. Anderson mindbender that often plays like “Lovecraft in Space.” It’s essentially a haunted-house movie in which the house is a spaceship, but that barely scratches the surface of a flick that has Neill delivering lines like “Hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.” Once again, his presence counterbalances the impossible, conveying some of the film’s most terrifying ideas through his ability to play every scene as if it’s happening to his character for the first time. ➽ On MGM+.
This is one of the films that’s often cited by fans as one of Neill’s underrated gems, a movie that was huge in Australia (it was the top grosser of 2000 in the country) but didn’t make the same impact around the world. It’s the story of the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales and how it played a role in bringing the moon landing in 1969 to the entire country. It’s a movie that makes you feel good about human innovation without ever feeling manipulative. Sadly, it’s hard to find streaming, but that’s what physical media is for. ➽ Unavailable, but the DVD and Blu-ray can be purchased online.
Neill’s best late-career work came in this delightful coming-of-age comedy from Taika Waititi. Julian Dennison stars as the troubled Ricky Baker, a kid who ends up on the run with an irascible old man, played by Sam Neill. But Neill doesn’t lean into the crotchety loner stereotype that could have ruined the entire film, finding a core of relatable decency in this outsider that instead holds the whole effort together with an honest humanity reflected in his choices. ➽ On Prime Video
He had already gained acclaim in a few films, but this is the work that first earned Neill attention from awards-giving bodies. Playing Sidney Reilly in this 1983 TV series, which ran 12 episodes, landed Neill a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor — Miniseries or Television Film and likely helped him land an audition for James Bond just a few years later. Imagine how different pop-culture history might have been. ➽ On BritBox
Broadcast TV networks used to have original event movies, too. This was one of the biggest of 1998, airing over two nights on NBC. Neill plays the title character in an origin story for the legendary supporting player in the King Arthur saga. Helena Bonham Carter, Miranda Richardson, and John Gielgud co-star in a film that landed Neill his first of just two Emmy nominations. (The other was for narration work on a documentary called New Zealand: Earth’s Mythical Islands.) ➽ On Prime Video and Peacock.
Never quite as acclaimed as some other Showtime hits, this one nonetheless featured an insane cast, including legends like Max von Sydow and Peter O’Toole, alongside Natalie Dormer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Henry Cavill, and Mr. Neill as the all-powerful Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York. Neill’s arc only lasted the first season, but he left an impact on the series. ➽ On Prime Video and Paramount+
Here’s another original series in which Neill’s role didn’t recur over the entire run but nonetheless made a major impact on the show. In this case, he played Major Chester Campbell in the first two seasons of the BBC Two series, one eventually bought by Netflix for U.S. distribution. ➽ On Netflix
There are a few posthumous Sam Neill projects forthcoming, but this could end up being his last impactful role. He plays Yosemite’s chief park ranger when a suspicious death arises. Without spoiling too much of it, the final twists of Untamed get a little ridiculous, but Neill’s acting chops return yet again to ground the proceedings, making them somehow believable. ➽ On Netflix
The 17 Sam Neill Performances to Watch Over and Over Again
