Sam Neill has died | Hacker News Reader

Sam Neill has died

theguardian.com

474 pointsj4mie114 comments

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.

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.

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.

I watched it every Jan 1 with some pizza

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

You are forever in our hearts, Vasili.

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

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

Sorry, I’m not one myself, and the one I met this weekend I only just met

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

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.

A shame it has Marc Maron in it.

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.

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

So sad. Jurassic Park had a tremendous impact on me as a dino obsessed teenager ( was 13 when it came out). RIP.

It’s a unix system, I know this!

The file navigator she used was running on a silicon graphics machine, called fsn

https://preterhuman.net/software/file-system-navigator-fsn-s...

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Can you elaborate for those of us who don't know Warhammer?

In W40k the primary form of FTL travel is the Immaterium or Warp, a realm of pure psychic energy inhabited by the Chaos gods and countless demons. Spaceships traveling through the Warp need powerful protective shields lest they be possessed and consumed by said demons... which is exactly what happens in the movie.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Immaterium

Kinda reminds of the inter-dimensional angry aliens from The Expanse that made ships disappear when transiting through the ring gates.

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.

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.

The part I liked in Event Horizon was Laurence Fishburn's character seeing the logs of the crew going crazy and immediately turning it off and saying, "We're leaving."

Probably the smartest decision made in a horror film. Time to get out of Dodge.

Yeah! Its a great movie if you dont try to nitpick stuff, which is hard for me to do on a lot of things too.

Neill: We can't just abandon this ship, we just found her Fishburn: I have no intentions of abandoning her. We will get far enough away from it and blow it up. Fuck this ship.

Australian flag.

* Their Southern Cross is more astronomically accurate (it includes Epsilon Crucis) our one omits it

* They have an additional seven pointed star to represent the six territories/states of Australia, the seventh point being added when they took control of Papua to represent anything else they added to the federation as time went on

* Their stars are white, ours are red

But fully agree, I loved that it the Union Jack was replaced with the Aborigine flag at Sam Neill's behest, because after all, it _is_ the future right?

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

I always thought the same about CSI. Have the set designers ever been to a lab?

I know it was "a long, long time ago", but why hasn't adequate lighting been invented in the Star Wars Universe?

You have a humanoid rich enough to own a couple robots, but their house is apparently entirely lit by about one candlelight.

Pretty sure it's "But I LOVE what he did for the Australian flag." - he is a kiwi but that's arguably the Aussie flag with the colonial bit replaced with the local one

It's got white stars, it has the seven pointed "Commonwealth star", and astronomically, it's more correct as it includes Epsilon Crucis.

Our flag has red stars, no bonus commonwealth star, and for some reason, whoever designed our flag decided that ε Cru could go fuck itself.

And I love him to bits for insisting that in the future, Australia would surely have a) become a republic and b) embraced the Aborigine first peoples. It's a remarkably hopeful vision of the future for a movie where he ends up running around without eyes saying creepy shit.

Not arguably, definitely.

Pandorum was pretty crazy (he wasn’t in it, but it was an odd space horror movie, and I feel that Event Horizon kind of paved the way).

Australian flag. The black, red and yellow flag he replaced the Union Jack with is the Australian first nations flag

My bad. I need to retake my geography classes from high school

You're sweet as mate, we're used to it eh.

Hell, it's why one of our former PMs had a referendum to try to replace our flag.

He got seated under an Aussie flag once at an international big important meeting, thus he decided to spend $21 million getting people to vote on whether or not to adopt a flag that looked like the logo a meat company would stick on a frozen leg of lamb being exported to the EU [0]. We ultimately voted against the meat wrapper.

My personal preference was for either the Black Jack [1] (because I loved how it co-opted the Union Jack with Māori design elements - the curved white koru) and tbh, we do love the colour black, or...

...Seeing as we're having a bit of a silly referendum anyway, good ol Laser Kiwi [2] (the white feather thing is the silver fern/ponga, adopted as our national plant when pteridomania was running rampant in the British Empire, and is often used as a logo for national sports teams, and for naming several female sports teams - Silver Ferns, White Ferns, Black Ferns), because who doesn't love the idea of shooting lasers out of your eyes?

John Oliver had a lot of fun with the whole debate. [3]

Oh, and fun fact, I believe during the anti-ICE protests, some Minnesotans were inspired by Laser Kiwi and brought about Laser Loon. [4]

----

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/NZ...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/NZ_flag_...

[2]: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/sites/default/files/styles/wide/pu...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2tL--HMIo

[4]: https://images.thespinoff.co.nz/1/2026/02/Tinas-FeatureImage...

> Spaceships are workplaces and workplaces

...with very constrained sources of power. Lighting places where humans are not is wasting that power.

You have a power plant capable of generating the energy needed to take you to relativistic speeds (at minimum) or punch holes through spacetime (a couple hundred orders of magnitude more) that’ll radiate a Hiroshima per second in waste heat (at 99.99999% efficiency converting energy into movement). You can certainly power a couple light bulbs.

Yeah but you save a couple bucks per ship if you cut the lighting to the absolute minimum required to keep crew shrinkage at an acceptable rate, and across the entire fleet that adds up to a nice bonus.

It’s a wonderful little movie. Absolutely adorable.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

You misunderstand.

When someone is confronted with something as powerful as imminent mortality, it pervades all your decisions.

Both explanations can be true.

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.

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.

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.

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

RIP to a real one.

I'm getting old, all my childhood heroes die.

Here's to "trying to be someone's childhood heroes"

Without dancing on TikTok or pulling stupid faces for YouTube thumbnails

Yup, we can dream bigger and give bigger dreams :)

A silver lining in the tech progress is this : I remember watching movies from the 60s or the 70s, in the 90s, and feeling "damn, that looks old". I could only care about movies made after 1984, or something (and, men, did amblin and the "produced by Steven Spielberg-verse" give us good things to watch.)

I suspect that, now that movies are kinda "converging" in terms of visual, it will be easier to share the movies of our childhoods with the next generation.

Besides, they don't care that much about looks : I litteraly witnessed 10 year old kids getting hooked on my 1991 game boy !!!!

I love you, wholeheartedly.

It gets worse. You start realising that the new heroes you're discovering are all younger than you.

... and they are not that interesting / relatable

You’ll fit right in on this site then. It’s mostly elderly Americans sundowning and posting about their youth.

"Mostly"? Nah. A HUGE number of contributors are from a myriad of countries.

Using "myriad" loosely. Don't be that "Well acshually" guy.

I'm not american, but ok, why not :)

Today New Zealand has lost a national treasure.

Haere atu rā ki te okiokinga.

And Northern Ireland.

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

He's as Australian as Russell Crowe and Lamingtons!

They can have Russell Crowe. But you'll take Lamingtons from my cold dead hands!

Or Ryan Gosling.

https://youtu.be/TeONP37qsSo?si=cPLF_UpcuW7dfruT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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

Loved Hunt for the Wilder People.

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

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.)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

Event horizon.

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.

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

Remind me to never go to orbit around Neptune.

"What makes you think I'll miss?"

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Riley Ace of Spies: RIP Sam

Give me a ping Vasily. One ping only please.

Sad.

A minute of silence for him. No echoes.

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.

Godspeed. ;~;7

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 :(

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