The Twelve star Sam Neill reflects on his life in television, including his favourite reality franchise, and how The Avengers caused sewage problems in Christchurch.
Sam Neill is one of the most well-known and beloved New Zealand actors of all time, appearing on our screens in everything from Jurassic Park, to The Piano, to Peaky Blinders, to all these charming photographs with his cute farm animals. This week he returns as Brett Colby QC in The Twelve, a drama which delves into the complex lives of the jurors tasked with reaching a verdict on a murder case in the rural Australian township of Tunkwell.
What might be not as widely-known about Neill is that he studied first year law but, according to his Wikipedia page, failed all four papers. “I’m not proud of it but it’s true. I just didn’t have the brain or the application to pull it off,” he told The Spinoff. “If I’d become a barrister, my father would have considered that a real job. He liked what I did, but it wasn’t a real job as far as he was concerned.” Real job or not, there’s no denying that Neill has done all right for himself since.
“Now I can just be a pretend lawyer,” he chuckled.
While he says traditional courtroom dramas risk becoming “claustrophobic”, the strength of The Twelve is that it expands into the outside world and the lives of the people involved. “Juries are supposed to be 12 ordinary men and women, but there’s no such thing as an ordinary man or woman,” he said. “Everyone has their own story and their own dramas and The Twelve really explores how those stories intersect or influence what’s happening in the courtroom.”
While he’s aware of the appetite for high profile and sordid court cases, mentioning a certain trial unfolding at the High Court in Auckland right now, Neill isn’t a huge consumer of the genre. “I binged our own show, and I thought it was really good, but I can’t remember the last courtroom drama I watched.” That said, he’s still watching plenty of television. “Probably too much television,” he laughed. “I’ve had some really great binges over the last few years.”
Please approach the My Life in TV bench with your evidence then, Sir Sam Neill.
My earliest TV memory is… We must have been about the last country in the world to actually get television. We had a great big TV set at the time which took up half the room, but had a very small screen, about the size of a computer screen. We all gathered around it watching black and white shows, and I very much clearly remember Dad swearing and fiddling with the aerials. It was often a very frustrating experience, but it was sort of amazing to have moving images in your own sitting room. Bonanza is probably the earliest thing I remember watching on TV.
My first onscreen role was… I think the first thing I did that I’d actually own up to would be a little docu-drama called Ashes made by Pacific Films. Barry Barclay wrote it, and I played a priest in it. That was the first time I thought, “oh, this is interesting, this is something that maybe I could do”. There was almost no work for actors on screen in New Zealand at that time, so it was something that I never considered would be possible. But events took over, and that’s what I ended up doing.
My earliest television crush was… Emma Peel in The Avengers. Like most of New Zealand, I was dreaming about her at night. I was living in Christchurch at the time, and I remember the whole of Christchurch would get up at the same time and go to the lav during the commercial break. So there would be this sort of tidal wave, and the sewage system in Christchurch always had a lot of problems during The Avengers.
The NZ TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… I think the cheesier the better, really. But the one that I’ve never been able to get out of my head is the early Chesdale Cheese ad. It’s an old-fashioned cartoon, with these two blokes in gumboots singing “we are the blokes from down on the farm, we really know our cheese.” And it ended with this extraordinary couplet: “it’s ched-dar, made bet-ter. That’s a really bad rhyme and shouldn’t be encouraged.
My TV guilty pleasure is… This really is guilty. There was a while where I just could not watch the news anymore. Everything was so depressing and alarming, Ukraine and Gaza and the looming elections in the US and so on, and so I’d have to watch something really, really stupid. I got hooked – not for long – but I did get hooked on Married at First Sight Australia. I am so embarrassed to say, but it’s just excruciating and hilarious. Everything about it is toe-curling, but that is what is so great about it. Utterly toe-curling and you get so caught up in it. It’s ridiculous.
My favourite television show of all time is… That’s easy: Babylon Berlin. It’s an extremely ambitious show set at the end of the Weimar Republic, just before the rise of the Nazis. And it follows two main characters – a detective who has PTSD from the first war and a drug addiction, and a young woman who is a wannabe detective also a part time sex worker. Every level of society is explored and it has such great storylines. Those first two seasons of Babylon Berlin were the greatest thing I’ve ever seen on television.
My favourite character I’ve ever played on TV is… I don’t have favourites, that’s policy. But the television character that I’ve got the most positive feedback from is Inspector Campbell from Peaky Blinders. He was a lot of fun to play, a very multi-layered, complex character.
My favourite TV project I’ve ever worked on is… The one I’m the most proud of was the Captain Cook series I did around the Pacific from Alaska down to Antarctica. It was a great privilege to visit those places and be with all those people and to follow that story. We also had very important rules that we set for ourselves – the main one being that I wanted to know the story from both sides of the beach, so to speak. So when a ship turns up, what were the indigenous people thinking, and what were Cook and his crew thinking? I think the series stands up well because of that.
The TV project I wish I had been involved in is… I’d probably land myself in Berlin in 1929 in Babylon Berlin. What wonderful actors and what an incredibly interesting time in world history that was. They’d have to make a role up for a New Zealander who’s got lost, of course.
My controversial TV opinion is… I think that those in charge really need to look at what their responsibilities are. Now that newspapers are in decline and we’re living in an age where the truth is increasingly under attack, it really is the responsibility of people who run television stations to bring us the news and in-depth current affairs. We need really good information. It’s more critical today than it’s ever been, and I think there’s a lot of dereliction and the people in charge have got to do better.
The TV show I will never watch is… I’m in Vancouver at the moment and I’ve turned on Fox a few times here, just out of morbid curiosity, and I will never turn it on again. The stuff they talk about and the misinformation is incredible. It defies belief that it’s allowed to continue. When Joe Biden gave his blessing to Kamala I was watching Fox, and they started talking about how they hadn’t heard from Biden for 24 hours and needed proof of life, kind of propagating the idea that there’d been some kind of coup and Joe Biden was dead. It was crazy, crazy shit. Yeah, I definitely don’t need to watch any more of that rubbish.
The last thing I watched on television was… Not only was it the last thing, but it’s also one of the best things, and you can find it on Netflix. It’s called Island of the Sea Wolves. I love a good nature documentary, and this is as good as any I’ve ever seen. It was absolutely fantastic, it follows these animals through a year cycle on Vancouver Island. A couple of seagulls bringing up a chick, an otter mum with her little baby, and these wolves that get separated. All these amazing stories that are so involving and moving, I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed it. Much more wholesome than Married at First Sight, that’s for sure.