SAM NEILL: “Home at last”

Sam Neill’s antics on social media brought joy to millions through the bleak days of lockdown while he, like many, was stranded far from home. Now back in New Zealand, he chats exclusively to Susan Chenery, and we visit his wild, windswept Otago farm.

- Susan Chenery

When Sam Neill left his vineyard in the Southern Alps of New Zealand to work on the Apple TV+ series, Invasion, last February he couldn’t have anticipated how long it would take to get home again. Or what was to follow. That borders would close and the world would stop; that there would be a season and a vintage on the vineyard he wouldn’t see. And he certainly didn’t plan on becoming a sort of kindly global uncle amusingly reassuring anxious, uncertain people as the pandemic spread and lockdown became the reality. To his half a million Twitter followers, there he was playing Radiohead and Randy Newman songs on the ukulele, reading poems and children’s books, duetting with Jeff Goldblum on jazz piano and bringing us Cinema Quarantino: comedy short films with his friends David Wenham, Hugo Weaving and Helena Bonham Carter.

This social media star who suddenly appeared in the crisis came as a surprise to those who know Sam, including his son, Tim, who describes him as “such a private and reserved person”. It wasn’t a Sam Neill that his friend of 33 years Rachel Ward had seen before either: “He’s actually quite a shy, retiring man in many ways, but he’s completely embraced it and invented this wonderful, avuncular character that is sending messages out there to try to calm the populace and to encourage them to stay home.”