Sam Neill has died

That I have a DevOps company working entirely on Linux can be directly attributed to realizing as a kid that Unix was a real thing and I needed to install it on my own computer. Interesting it was soon after this movie came out that FreeBSD and Linux were becoming popular.

benburton• 10 days ago

Today New Zealand has lost a national treasure.

Haere atu rā ki te okiokinga.

nephihaha3• 10 days ago

And Northern Ireland.

decimalenough• 10 days ago

And Australia. He lived in Sydney and the Aussie PM just posted a tribute.

vinkelhake• 10 days ago

Give me a ping Vasily. One ping only please.

Sad.

rbanffy5• 10 days ago

A minute of silence for him. No echoes.

pico303• 10 days ago

One of my favorite actors of all time. If you haven’t seen it, watch The Dish.

the-mitr• 10 days ago

also the Event Horizon, his change of character is something you don't forget..

rbanffy5• 10 days ago

Not my favourite movie though. The horror in space trope is a very tired one.

Alongside the poorly lit spaceship. Spaceships are workplaces and workplaces should provide adequate illumination so you can see what you are doing.

But I LOVE what he did for the New Zealand flag.

s_dev• 10 days ago

Even Horizon is a Warhammer 40k film that has nothing to do with Warhammer 40k.

InsideOutSanta• 10 days ago

That's always the role I remember first when I hear his name, because it seems so unusual for him and because he was so great in it.

RALaBarge3• 9 days ago

Something that is burnt into me is saying "DO YOU SEE?", invoking the final lines of Neill in Event Horizon

rbanffy5• 10 days ago

It’s a wonderful little movie. Absolutely adorable.

Neil44• 10 days ago

He had a lovely gentle demeanor about him. He was good recently in the Untamed series.

GenericDev• 10 days ago

To this day, Event Horizon is one of the scariest premises to a horror movie I have ever watched. And it's thanks to Sam Neill's performance that it lives rent free in my head.

Love this guy. Gonna miss him :(

ares623• 10 days ago

RIP. Where he's going, he won't need eyes. Wait, perhaps that was an inappropriate quote to use.

chvid• 10 days ago

Event horizon.

pantulis• 10 days ago

"Where we're going, we don't need eyes to see".

sgt• 9 days ago

Remind me to never go to orbit around Neptune.

RALaBarge3• 9 days ago

"What makes you think I'll miss?"

Vaslo2• 9 days ago

He was great in it - horribly underrated movie though I concede the gore at a 8 or 9 out of 10 is not for everyone. The deaths were supposed to be far gorier and the film of the prior crew was to be longer and harder to watch until the studio stepped in.

nephihaha3• 10 days ago

Hunt for the Wilder People was fun, as was Reilly, Ace of Spies.

bushwart• 10 days ago

Loved Hunt for the Wilder People.

donatj• 10 days ago

I honestly didn't know he was a Kiwi until I saw Hunt for the Wilder People. Absolutely fantastic movie.

nephihaha3• 9 days ago

He's originally from Northern Ireland and spent much of his life in NZ (although he has spent time in the USA, Australia and other parts of the UK.)

TrackerFF• 10 days ago

I’ve watched “In The Mouth of Madness” so many times. It is in my top 3 most re-watched horror movies list. Perfect Lovecraftian horror, and Sam Neill was perfect in it.

Do you read Sutter Cane?

jhickok• 9 days ago

It's a great movie! One of the best attempts at capturing a Lovecraftian vibe, maybe only bested by The Thing or his excellent Event Horizon.

Vaslo2• 9 days ago

You made me think about the possibility of him being in The Thing - if he was chosen for that film, I wonder who he would have played.

mulhoon• 10 days ago

I watched Possession (1981) a few weeks back. One of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen. His acting was so different from his later stuff.

fetus8• 10 days ago

Possession is such a fantastically special movie, heavily due to Neill and Adjani’s performances.

RIP to a real one.

lopsotronic• 9 days ago

One of my favorite horror films of the 1980s, Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 Possession.

One quote I heard about it, is that some movies are about madness, and other movies seem to be themselves mad, and Possession is one of those movies. It has this immediacy to it, and an unease that only grows in quantity and tenor. And you genuinely do not know where it is going. Believe me when I say this.

It might be Sam's most memorable performance, for me. The movie seemed to drive its entire cast and crew to exhaustion or worse.

Do not under any circumstances watch the old American cut, the initial release. It was re-edited with scenes out of order and has this bizarro solarization effect at random intervals. It's really really bad. The modern blu-ray and others have the actual movie.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 10 days ago

Ah, that sucks. I’ve always enjoyed him.

One of the inevitable features of getting older. All my cultural icons keep checking out.

te_chris• 10 days ago

As a kiwi he was the best of us. Creative, talented, willing to roll up his sleeves, maker of exceptional wine. Haere ra

bluerooibos• 10 days ago

An absolute legend. I thought he'd be around for longer. Thanks for making Jurassic Park what it is, Sam.

geocrasher• 10 days ago

"I would have liked to have seen Montana..."

You are forever in our hearts, Vasili.

testing223212• 9 days ago

I’m in Montana now, and I spent the weekend with a very energetic palaeontologist who has unearthed many dinosaurs.

esseph• 9 days ago

My son isn't college age yet but is interested in this route. Any tips for potential future paleontologists?

wewewedxfgdf2• 10 days ago

I saw him interviewed once and they asked about his cancer and he said that he did not find it very interesting. He said something to the effect of he finds living interesting and there's far more interesting things to talk about than his cancer. Paraphrased I don't recall exactly.

Findecanor• 10 days ago

It is a touchy subject. When you have it, you don't want to think about it all the time.

wewewedxfgdf2• 10 days ago

You misunderstand - the message is he was far more interested in living and what he could do with his life and genuinely found the cancer not interesting compared to other things.

He wasn't just being touchy and trying to change the subject.

1313ed01• 10 days ago

RIP. Here in Sweden the headlines mention primarily his role in Ivanhoe, a movie that has aired on Swedish TV almost every New Years for over 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe_(1982_film)

He posted this video message to the Swedish people for New Years 2023: https://www.svt.se/kultur/ivanhoe-skadespelarens-nyarshalsni...

Great movie.

bovermyer• 10 days ago

I have only ever seen the 1950s Ivanhoe film and part of a... I think it was a 1990s TV miniseries. I'll have to watch this.

az226• 10 days ago

I watched it every Jan 1 with some pizza

firmretention• 10 days ago

Ivanhoe is a story about a Russian farmer and his tool.

lysace2• 9 days ago

It was great fun to see him interact with viewers regarding this every/many Jan 1. He kind of embodied that global village spirit.

E.g.

https://x.com/TwoPaddocks/status/1212188526348890112 (2020)

I am relaxed, fit , and ready to fight the dreary Ivanhoe once more.

https://x.com/TwoPaddocks/status/1080048522492145664 (2019)

SWEDEN ! I have strapped on my body armor, renewed my courage, got my evils back, and am braced once again to Sweden's MOST HATED. And this year I WILL WIN . #HappyNewYear2019 #Ivanhoe

https://x.com/TwoPaddocks/status/947971082018889728 (2018)

Yes, my annual disemboweling seems to please Swedes every year. #Ivanhoe

Etc, going back to 2015.

rconti• 9 days ago

That was mentioned in the Guardian piece as well-- can you help explain the particular appeal of this film in Sweden?

lysace2• 9 days ago

Not them, but: It's a cozy/calm kind of movie. The cinematography is excellent.

Repeatedly being TV broadcast on jan 1st for many years turned it into a tradition for something to watch while being hung over.

It's also actually surprisingly good, as a whole.

frantathefranta• 9 days ago

The traditions are present in (probably) every European country. I think it's a combination of:

* One public broadcasting channel 40-50 years ago

* Someone decided to play a movie in the holiday period when most people sat around a TV

Norway has Tre nøtter til Askepott, Germany has Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel (they are the same Czech movie).

mindcrash• 10 days ago

Jurassic Park was the first movie I saw as a twelve year old boy at the cinema, and it not only made me a huge fan of the series but as a boy I was really into dinosaurs and it was really something to see them being "real" on a big screen for the first time.

"I have a theory that there are two kinds of boys. There are those that want to be astronomers, and those that want to be astronauts[...]That's the difference between imagining and seeing"

Thank you for everything, doctor Grant.

saalweachter• 9 days ago

I really appreciate the attempt by Chris & Jack to make Julysixth Park a thing.

I enjoyed Star Wars, but I kind of feel like a lot of my feelings towards it are just reflected nostalgia from the writers and comedians who grew up a generation before me.

Jurassic Park may not have been the first movie I saw in theaters, but it was still one of the movies of my childhood. The magic of it, and the experience of where we saw it -- the Mesker Park amphitheatre, in an outdoor showing, and then walking back to the car in the dark, past the Mesker Park Zoo, looking into the dark foliage and imagining dinosaurs.

jawilson2• 9 days ago

Same, I was born in '81, and JP is a cornerstone of my childhood, more-so than any other movie I can think of. I saw that movie at the theatre more than any other, at least 6 times that summer.

My favorite was at a drive-in in Kentucky. We used to rent boats at Lake Cumberland over the summer, and one night we watched JP at a drive-in. I remember the drive back to the dock late at night, driving through the woods, and imagining it was a Jurassic jungle. Then, back on the houseboat, going reading through my "Making of Jurassic Park" book with a battery operated book light.

lapcat• 10 days ago

I'll never forget Neill as Damien in Omen III.

I'd very much like to forget Neill as Damien in Omen III. Chilling.

jzb• 9 days ago

Good performance, not really a good movie. It was a bit of a letdown after parts I and II, but he was well cast. The writing wasn’t there: didn’t quite stick the landing.

gautamcgoel• 10 days ago

So sad to hear this. Hard to imagine anyone else playing Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park.

major505• 10 days ago

If someone here likes horror movies I highly recommend watching his work in Possession (1981) and Mouth of Madness (1995).

If you prefer a more family focused comedy, go with Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), from the same director of the excelent What we Do in the Shadows.

tjpnz• 10 days ago

Bicentennial Man is one of my favourite films of his (also Robin Williams). There's an interesting subplot in there on right to repair which is very much relevant today. It also depicts a future 30 years away which might've seemed bleak when it was first conceived, but is in many ways more hopeful than what we actually got.

samsudden• 10 days ago

RIP. Recently watched Series 3 of The Twelve, and thought "No way is he in his 70s", and had just finished reading his autobiography "Did I Ever Tell You This?" - delightful read.

weikju• 10 days ago

Aside from Jurassic Park and the other roles mentioned, I also liked his role in the Merlin TV two part movies. Now I need to rewatch both…

twelvedogs• 10 days ago

i saw him around a lot on tv and so on as an australian, just genuinely a pretty good bloke. like i dunno what to say i don't know if i've ever cried about an actor dying before

i'd love to say he was awesome in every role but he always seemed super honest in his performance and i think that hurt him a lot when he had to play bullshit characters lol.

i dunno i'm just some guy

olivierestsage• 10 days ago

Rest in peace. Like many here, his performances were hugely influential on my childhood (and adulthood). One I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is Merlin.

nilamo2• 9 days ago

His Merlin was always my favorite, though I've never heard anyone else mention it out in the wild.

fnordsensei• 9 days ago

Same here. The miniseries itself has its quirks and oddities, but I find it charming. Particularly his role as Merlin.

Lord-Jobo• 9 days ago

The whole miniseries is (or was very recently) free on YouTube. I recommend it, it’s very unique and interesting

pseudohadamard• 9 days ago

Or Smith in Sleeping Dogs: "I got my eye on you boy!".

throwaway29303• 9 days ago

Godspeed. ;~;7

JKCalhoun• 9 days ago

His debut in the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die is in the 1979 film, My Brilliant Career [1].

("Hey, that's a young Sam Neill!")

[1] https://youtu.be/aU3kXBb6Yc4

krupan• 9 days ago

If you have not seen Hunt for the Wilderpeople (staring Sam Neil) find it and watch it today!

tanseydavid• 9 days ago

Emphatic "SECOND" to this recommendation. This is a very enjoyable and touching film.

noefingway• 9 days ago

First time I saw him was in Riley Ace of Spies. A great series that was on PBS. Last series I watched was Untamed. He was one of my favorite actors and a credit to his profession. Sad to learn of his passing.

toomuchtodo• 9 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Neill

OrvalWintermute• 9 days ago

Sam Neill had a great & prolific career; particularly appreciated his role as Cardinal Thomas Wolsey on The Tudors

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000554/

kayo_20211030• 9 days ago

Sam Neill did a super podcast with Marc Maron a few years ago. He came across as a really stand-up bloke - genuine, funny, smart and kind; and every obit I've seen today seems to echo all that. It's well worth a listen. https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1202-sam-neill

kroaton• 9 days ago

A shame it has Marc Maron in it.

ballooney• 9 days ago

I have rarely had such displeasure from hearing such an interesting interviewee having to cope with such a cretinous interviewer. I’m very surprised you recommended this.

asimpletune• 9 days ago

He was an amazing actor. One of his best roles was “Reilly: Ace of Spies”.

symfoniq• 9 days ago

Besides his role in Jurassic Park, I will always appreciate Sam Neill’s understated but important role as Borodin, the reliable and loyal First Officer in The Hunt for Red October. His character’s death (a change from the book) added emotional weight to the story.

conartist6• 9 days ago

I've seen both films many times and I honestly never realized these two characters are played by the same person.

Danox• 9 days ago

Riley Ace of Spies: RIP Sam

Sam Neill has died

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