Sam Neill: Sam I Am

"But at least if you had played Keitel's role," I persist, "we wouldn't have had to see him naked once, let alone in a couple of more movies since."

"Hmm," Neill responds dryly "Did you see Harvey's willy in The Piano? I didn't. I guess I must have blinked. If I had done the role and said 'no' to nudity, though, I'm sure Jane would have talked me into it." There's no telling who talked Neill into Snow White: A Tale of Terror, in which Sigourney Weaver, playing his wicked wife, extracts his semen by sexually stimulating him by hand--plenty spiritedly. How exactly did the reserved Neill prepare for this scene?

At this question, Neill buries his face in his hands and roars with laughter. "Oh, my God! My God, I'd forgotten that! When you put that scene to me that way, it's sort of a shock, isn't it? Well, Sigourney and I were ... um ... very close. She's a good sport. You can't prepare for something like that--you just have to make it up as you go along, I guess. When I heard that the movie wasn't going to be released in theaters but on Showtime, I thought, 'It seems like a waste.' The script had a quite wonderful gothic quality to it--cannibalism, the terrifying stepmother, the sense of medieval Europe as a great, dark forest filled with bad guys and all sorts of critters one had to deal with to get from clearing to clearing. [But] there was a lot of anxiety around that set, a lot of argy-bargy behind the scenes to which I always make sure I am not in any way privy."

I ask Neill how he accounts for being one of the few guys onscreen to look relaxed around such other strong female screen presences as Meryl Streep, with whom he's worked twice, and Judy Davis, with whom he's worked three times. "I think I was probably quite good in A Cry in the Dark," he offers, recalling director Fred Schepisi's reality-based film, in which he plays a man whose wife was convicted of murder after a dingo made off in the night with their infant. "I absolutely love working with women. I mean, action/buddy is a fairly limited thing. With women, there's so much room for nuance, and, generally speaking, the stuff between women and men is often better written. I've also become very close friends with some of the women with whom I've worked--Laura Dern, Anjelica Huston, Holly Hunter. Meryl, I think, is a friend."

At the mention of Streep, Neill smiles wryly. When I ask him why, he tells me, after some prodding, "The very first day on Plenty, we had to go to bed and do a sex scene. She, frankly, insisted we be clothed, so I still had on my overcoat or something and there I am rogering her on the bed, so very nervous, thinking to myself, I'm on top of Meryl Streep! I'm on top of MERRRYL STRRREEP!' I was so shy about pelvic contact with Merrryl Strrreep, I was sort of sliding on top of her. It looks completely and utterly unconvincing."

And what are Neill's thoughts about the prodigiously gifted, prodigiously singular Judy Davis, with whom he worked in My Brilliant Career, One Against the Wind (for which he won his second Golden Globe nomination, the first having been for the UK TV series Reilly: The Ace of Spies) and Children of the Revolution? "I've known Judy Davis for 20 years and I would say I know less about her now than when I first met her. She is a most wonderful and accomplished actor who can do anything, but I don't know her at all. I really wish I did."

Since I've been aware, as we've been chatting, of two scarily stylish, middle-aged women craning their necks to get a better look at Neill--their attention is lost on him completely--I ask what he makes of his looks, now that he's edged past 50. "I think I had some a long time ago," he observes, shrugging, "but that's well in the past." Readers should know that from where I sit, it's perfectly obvious Neill is too modest or plain crazy--the late-model Neill is possibly preferable to the sharper, more feral younger version. Does a guy as attractive as Neill find show business particularly tough on personal relationships? "Without question it's a tough business on relationships," he asserts. "You really have to think seriously about what it means to be a 'husband.' You have to go the extra mile. It's not so much just that temptation is all around you, because as far as I'm concerned, anyway, that's not an issue. It's absence. Absence is difficult."

A gentleman's response. But as the man who stirred hearts on both sides of the pond playing Reilly: The Ace of Spies, has he tried to fathom the appeal a cad exerts on- and offscreen? "It wears on me to see cads at work in real life," he comments. "Really, though, it's this simple: listen and you're in. That's how a cad works. They listen as if no one else in the world but this particular woman had an opinion so important. Depressing, isn't it? Doubly depressing because it tells us that men who are not cads just don't listen at all."

Neill himself is a family man, apparently happily so. "I always get a kick out of being in Los Angeles with my family," he says. "I mean, this is where Brian Wilson comes from. And Frank Gehry. The one thing I find sad when I come to Los Angeles, though, is realizing that the world here is populated by millions of people who want to be actors and never will be. It's unbearably sad to live your life and not be able to do what you really want. And it's a particularly American thing, I think, to advise people to follow their dreams. You ought to be very careful about advising such things, because people have all kinds of entirely unrealistic dreams. As a result, so many people here think of themselves as losers, which is the worst thing you can be called in America. If you divide society into winners and losers, 98 percent of the people will feel like losers. That attitude is particularly prevalent among athletes. You know how it is: win a race and thank God for assisting you past that post. What kind of God is it that picks you to be a winner and everyone else to be a loser? I dread the Olympics coming to Sydney. I can't bear the thought of all those people coming and having medals stuck on them, while the others are sent back to obscurity."

As we gather up ourselves for our next appointments, I ask whether Neill is having the kind of fun he hoped that acting might bring, and he quickly answers, "I am incredibly blessed with my family, with my job. I'm working at a level I never would have imagined. I mean, Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas in Montana, what could be nicer? At the same time, I'm under no duress. My life is my own. I never wanted to be a success for the very good reason that, if I weren't a success, I would be unhappy. I have more than I ever dreamed of. I want for nothing."

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Stephen Rebello wrote about "The New Divas" for the October '97 issue of Movieline.

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