The Closest I Ever Got to Sam Neill

Vale Sam.

Sam Neill has died, and I find myself unexpectedly wanting to sit down and tell you all a story.

He gave us so many good films over the years — more than I could possibly list, and every one of you will have your own favourite tucked away somewhere. Jurassic Park, obviously. The Piano. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. That particular brand of dry, watchful, slightly rumpled charm he brought to everything, where you always got the sense he found the whole business of being a film star faintly ridiculous and was quietly enjoying the joke. I liked him enormously, in the way you like someone you’ve never met but have watched be excellent for forty years.

But my best memory of the man isn’t from a screen at all. It’s from a paddock in New Zealand, and it remains, to this day, one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes.

Let me set the scene for you.

Some years back I was on a Lord of the Rings tour through New Zealand. Now, I want to be clear about the calibre of people I was travelling with, because it matters enormously to what follows. We were not casual fans. We were not there to nod politely at a nice view, buy a fridge magnet, and be back at the hotel in time for the buffet. This was a fully immersive pilgrimage, and it was run like one.

The days were long. We’d often be up and moving before sunrise and still going late into the night, chasing the light, chasing the locations, chasing the exact spot where a thing had happened in a film that, to us, had rather more authority than most historical records. And here is the detail I really need you to sit with: a good number of my fellow travellers would set their alarms an hour earlier than they strictly had to — sacrificing sleep they desperately needed — purely so they could don their ears and their wigs, strap on their fake feet, and assemble each individual, painstakingly recreated piece of costuming, so that they might walk the paths of their chosen race properly attired. Not for a photo. Not for a laugh. For the integrity of the experience.

That was the calibre of devotion on that coach.

And it wasn’t only the dressing-up, either. This was a serious tour — run by Red Carpet Tours, in fact, and this same crew, plus or minus a few faces, has now done the whole pilgrimage twice — and it opened serious doors. We had lunch with the producers. We sat in on classes with the make-up artists who’d done the real thing. Weta Workshop opened their doors to us and let us stand among the actual artistry of it all. We were, in short, known. We were followed around by newspapers — and yes, I’m dating myself here, but this was back when newspapers were printed on paper and a photographer would trail a busload of costumed adults across the countryside because it made for a genuinely good story.

And speaking of photographs: when our group of twenty-five descended on Hobbiton, we came away with over twelve thousand photos between us. Twelve thousand. From one visit. To one location. We used to joke that no tour group on earth had ever documented a patch of ground so thoroughly — that entire professional survey teams had mapped smaller areas with fewer images. Every door of every hobbit hole. Every cabbage. Every artfully placed tiny wheelbarrow. If it existed in the Shire, we have it archived in triplicate from four angles.

Now, I’ll be honest with you: not every one of us was quite that far gone. There were some of us — and I count myself gently among this number — who were deeply, sincerely committed to the books and the films, but who had perhaps not crossed fully into the fake-feet-before-dawn tier of devotion. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I have nothing but love and admiration for the pre-sunrise wig people. I simply also enjoy sleep.) But committed tragics, one and all. That’s the important part. Whether we were in full regalia or merely in spirit, we took our roles seriously. Possibly too seriously. Definitely too seriously.

And lest you think I’m exaggerating the depth of it for comic effect — I’m really not. Here is the proof of the pudding: two of our bravest of men, the very fellows who served as our tour’s own Boromir and Aragorn, now work for Weta as weaponsmiths. Actual weaponsmiths. Forging the actual blades. And two of our hobbits went on to join Weta as costume experts. Four of the people on that coach were so genuinely, unshakeably good at this that the wizards behind the curtain took one look and hired them. So when I tell you we were a serious bunch, please understand I am not being cute about it. We were a pipeline.

So there we were, early one particular morning, being told with a certain amount of ceremony by our lovely guide that this afternoon we’d be making a special stop at Sam Neill’s favourite café. Not far, apparently, from his winery. There was a pause, clearly designed for a ripple of excited murmuring to pass through the coach.

The ripple did not come.

We took this news entirely in our stride and carried on regardless, because — and I say this with the greatest affection and no small amount of shame — poor Sam meant very little to a coachful of Tolkien obsessives. We had bigger fish to fry. We had Rohan to think about. This was a group that would rise before dawn to correctly attach a pair of pointed ears; a café patronised by a knighted New Zealand screen legend simply could not compete, in that moment, with the promise of another paddock that had once, briefly, in a certain light, been Middle-earth.

I’m not proud of it. But I’m not going to lie to you either.

When we finally arrived, the group split neatly in two. Some of us descended on the café like a clan of hobbits who’d caught the scent of second breakfast and would not be stopped by man nor Nazgûl. And a few of us — myself included — stayed behind on the coach.

Now, in my defence, I had earned that rest. We all had. It had been a big day. We had made the climb up to the site of the Golden Hall — where Éowyn stands watching the riders return to Rohan — and stood at the top waving the very flag the Fellowship carried, the wind doing its level best to tear it out of our hands. And here is the part that still makes me laugh: I found that climb genuinely difficult in ordinary human shoes, with ankles and arch support and all the advantages of modern footwear. The hobbits did it in silicone hairy feet. Silicone hairy feet. Up a steep, windswept hillside. And they did it without complaint, because to complain would have been to break character, and one does not break character on the paths of one’s chosen race. I have never simultaneously respected and worried about a group of people more.

We had also recreated the Charge of the Rohirrim across a hillside with more commitment than dignity. And we had spent a genuinely alarming amount of time on our hands and knees searching for Pippin’s Elven brooch, which one of our number had dropped and which had assumed, in our collective imagination, the significance of an actual plot point. We were spent. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. We slumped in our coach seats like the survivors of a great battle, which, in our heads, we absolutely were.

Little did we know that we — the exhausted, the seated, the ones who couldn’t be bothered — were about to receive the revelation of the entire tour.

Because as we sat there, a battered old SUV pulled up a little way off from the coaches. Nothing flash. The sort of car a man drives when he has nothing to prove to anybody and a winery to get back to. And out of it climbed a man.

I will never know precisely what tipped him off. I’ve turned it over many times since, and I like to imagine it unfolded slowly, the way dread always does in the films he was so good in.

Perhaps it was the fellow in full Boromir regalia, sword and all, slurping contentedly on a vanilla latte outside the café. Perhaps it was the Elven princess serenely demolishing a vanilla slice, crumbs cascading down her ethereal robes. But more likely — almost certainly — it was the three ginger hobbits who chose that exact moment to come clomping merrily out of his favourite café on their great fake hairy feet, chattering away, utterly at home.

Whatever it was, I watched it land.

The man went still. He slowly reached up and took off his glasses. And his eyes went wide — and I need you to understand that this was not a general sort of wide. This was specific. This was, to the millimetre, the exact expression Dr Alan Grant wears when he first stands up in that jeep and claps eyes on the dinosaurs. That pure, silent, slack-jawed awe. That “we’re going to make a fortune with this place” face. Except in reverse. Except the wonder was horror, and the dinosaurs were us.

And then, without a single word, Sam Neill — knight of the realm, national treasure, the man whose café this was — gently sank back down into his battered SUV, quietly closed the door, and reversed out of there in a magnificent cloud of gravel dust. Gone. Vanished. Fled his own regular haunt rather than face a busload of feral Tolkien enthusiasts eating pastries in cosplay.

I have never respected a man’s survival instincts more.

That was the closest I ever got to Sam Neill. Not a handshake. Not an autograph. Not even a hello. Just the fleeting, unforgettable privilege of watching a genuine legend decide, in real time, that whatever was happening at his café today was Not For Him — and remove himself from it with the speed and decisiveness of a man who has clearly outrun a velociraptor before and knows exactly how these things go.

And do you know what? I wouldn’t trade it. A handshake, I’d have forgotten. That, I have dined out on for years.

Rest easy, Sam. Thank you for the films, thank you for the wine you probably poured extra generously the moment you got home that afternoon, and thank you — most of all — for the retreat. You clocked the situation, you made the right call, and you got out clean.

Life, uh, finds a way. 🍷