We lost a legend yesterday. On July 13th, I was standing on the plains of Africa on safari when I got a Google alert (yes, my service worked all the way out among the Big Five). One of my favorites from my childhood passed away. Dr. Alan Grant, the man who introduced me to dinosaurs when I was a child, had passed away suddenly. Today, it was reported that he died from pneumonia due to having a compromised immune system after years of fighting a type of blood cancer. I don’t know why it hit me so hard. Maybe because it was a piece of my childhood stripped from me. Maybe we’re all still trying to recapture the wonders of our world that he so expertly presented as thrilling entertainment. Whatever the reason, I have been thinking about it ever since. I even watched Jurassic Park on the flight back (thank you, Delta Airlines for having it available since every streaming service out there has pulled it now in favor of rent service). That is when I started thinking about his career. From Jurassic Park and Merlin to Peaky Blinders and Event Horizon, here are two times Sam Neill changed Hollywood. Once with his presence and once with his absence.
He was almost 007
Sometimes the best thing you can do for a project is walk away. The 1987 film, The Living Daylights, served as the jumping-off point for multiple James Bond threads. The first was the introduction of Timothy Dalton as the debonair spy. He filled the Oxfords twice in films that felt very different. That is the second, the darkness of James Bond had never been explored before. It was a dangerous introduction that led first to Pierce Brosnan’s line in GoldenEye that staying cold is what keeps him alive, and it served as the prototype for what would become Daniel Craig’s Bond. But it almost wasn’t so. Sam Neill screen-tested for the role and talked later about how it wasn’t meant to be. Apparently, he was persuaded into auditioning for the part by his agent. He also admitted on his press tour for his return to the Jurassic Park franchise that he wouldn’t have taken the role because his friend Pierce Brosnan wanted it.
The screen test shows Neill in a scene charming a female while handling a Walther. It has a Sean Connery feel to it. Almost the perfect rendition of Connery’s version of the character. Had we gotten Sam Neill as James Bond, it would have been more of the same. While that isn’t a bad thing, it may have robbed us of the underrated brilliance of Timothy Dalton’s Bond. He may have done more than two movies, which would have robbed us of Brosnan’s take on the character. And we would have possibly missed out on the prototype for Craig to revolutionize the role decades later. Sure, we would have gotten a brilliant Bond with Sam Neill, but we would have missed out on so much more. Neill walking away was the best thing he ever did for the character.
He was almost not in Jurassic Park
One of my favorite exercises with movies is playing the what-ifs. When Steven Spielberg began looking for his Dr. Alan Grant, he went to the one person everyone would expect. I mean, who else would play a Steven Spielberg character wearing a brimmed hat and embodying the essence of adventure in the face of educated expertise? If that sounds a lot like Indiana Jones to you, it is because Harrison Ford was the legendary director’s first choice to play the paleontologist. Ford turned the role down, something Spielberg would later say crushed him. But that opened the door for others to throw their proverbial hats in the ring. Richard Dreyfuss, another Spielberg veteran, turned down the role. Along with Kurt Russell, William Hurt, Kevin Costner, and Tim Robbins.
At the end of the day, none of those actors would have been able to pull off the brainy scientist who hates kids like Neill. But what made Neill so engaging and captivating as Grant wasn’t that he was the action star like Russell. It wasn’t that he was the brainy one like Dreyfuss. It wasn’t that he was the cool one like Ford. Instead, it was because he could pull off all three while going through a character arc often overlooked in the movie reviews. He became a dad who didn’t like kids. We watched as another character abandoned the children (only to get picked off the toilet by a T-Rex) and then stepped in to protect them as if they were his own. The role of protector was thrust upon him, and he accepted it courageously. Even going so far as performing the most dad moment of the decade on film when he pretended to get electrocuted as a gag to loosen the tension with the kids.
Sam Neill would never be put into the category of film dad, but somehow he embodied everything we need in a dad. He protected us from danger. He taught us about dinosaurs. And he made us laugh when we needed it. Jurassic Park resonated with generations of viewers because Dr. Alan Grant was the hero we all felt we could be. Sam Neill cemented himself in our collective consciousness as the vessel of wonder in a world left behind long before we arrived. And he will sorely be missed.
