Sam Neill: ‘I don’t like the idea of retiring’

HE may be a grey nomad, but Sam Neill isn’t ready to quit just yet. With a career spanning more than 30 countries and 70 films, the actor reveals there is still plenty more work to be done.

Sam Neill: “All my family, my extended family, are Maori and Islander and Asian. My genetics would probably indicate otherwise but I don’t feel European.”

SAM Neill has spent the last 40 years on the road.

“The reason I don’t go away on specified holidays is that I always like to go home, because that is a holiday from travel,” says the 70-year-old actor, whose career has spanned more than 30 countries, 70 feature films and dozens of TV series. “I’ve been very peripatetic. Of course, there is always going to be something you miss, and I miss my farm now dreadfully, but I love travelling.”

Neill’s own professional wanderlust gave him a particular, even personal, connection with the subject of his latest project: Captain James Cook. The Kiwi actor took a year off acting to retrace the footsteps of the great, if controversial, explorer for the six-part Foxtel series The Pacific: In The Wake Of Captain Cook. (An accompanying book by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios will also be published.)

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Neill’s passion project explores 250 years of Pacific history, and Cook’s impact on the region, from “both sides of the beach”. Throughout the documentary, he interviews descendents of the people with whom Cook made first contact, in what were at times violent encounters. In places like New Zealand’s misnamed Poverty Bay, wounds are still raw.

Neill’s own professional wanderlust gave him a particular, even personal, connection with the subject of his latest project: Captain James Cook. (Pic: Dave Wheeler for Stellar)

Neill says that the journey has transformed him “from mere actor to man of the Pacific”. Although born in Northern Ireland, he identifies as a Kiwi and has been based there for most of his life. Home, when he’s there, is a converted tractor shed on his farm and vineyard near Clyde (he also has a bolthole in Sydney).

“As the project went on, I felt myself becoming more and more involved in it. Given that I am of the Pacific, my family even more so, it became increasingly personal.” Neill, who is reportedly dating Australian political journalist Laura Tingle, is separated from his wife, Japanese make-up artist Noriko Watanabe, with whom he has a daughter, Elena, and a stepdaughter, Maiko Spencer. He and former partner Lisa Harrow have a son, Tim. Neill has another son, Andrew, from a previous relationship in his early 20s. He has four grandchildren.

“All my family, my extended family, are Maori and Islander and Asian,” he tells Stellar. “My genetics would probably indicate otherwise but I don’t feel European.”

“I’ve been very peripatetic. Of course, there is always going to be something you miss, and I miss my farm now dreadfully, but I love travelling.” (Pic: Dave Wheeler for Stellar)

Neill is aware that others might seeit differently. “There were one or two people I came across who saw me as a coloniser even though my family has been here for 170 years and it’s never as straightforward as that. I’m clearly male and pale but I hope I’m not stale,” he says, alluding to his recent comments in support of New Zealand’s young female Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, whom he describes as a breath of fresh air.

As well as the deaths, cultural misunderstandings, navigational breakthroughs and at times peaceful cultural trade that resulted from first contact, The Pacific: In The Wake Of Captain Cook draws attention to the frequent sexual encounters between the Indigenous inhabitants and the crew of the HMS Endeavour each time they made land.

“It was very vivid in the European mind. The South Seas became a kind of trope, and it became very sexualised. I can understand if you are a Polynesian woman a lot of that can be very disturbing,” Neill says.

Sam Neill features in this week’s issue of Stellar.

Neill reveals he has been shocked by contemporary revelations, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, of sexual transgressions in his own industry. “A lot of my women friends have been involved, to a lesser or greater extent, and I keep saying to them, or I was: ‘How is it that I have never, that I am not aware of this stuff?’ And they always answer, ‘Because it never happens in front of you.’ Maybe I am Mr Naïve from off the farm, maybe I have got a tin ear and I am half blind or something, but so many of these revelations just come as a complete surprise to me.”

Having only just wrapped production on Rachel Ward’s ensemble dramedy Palm Beach, which co-stars Bryan Brown, Greta Scacchi, Jacqueline McKenzie and Richard E. Grant, the actor is about to head home to the farm in New Zealand. He is keen to catch up with his favourite pig, who features regularly on Twitter. “We are very good friends. I will go in and read a book in [his paddock] sometimes and just hang out with him.”

With two more acting projects lined up for the coming months, but which he can’t yet confirm, Neill is unlikely to be home for too long. “I don’t like the idea of ever having to retire. There is more work I want to do yet,” he says. “I would still like to put a few more runs on the board before somebody pulls stumps.”

The Pacific: In The Wake Of Captain Cook, with Sam Neill (HarperCollins, $39.99) is out tomorrow. The Foxtel series airs from August 27.

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Originally published as Sam Neill: ‘I don’t like the idea of retiring’