By the time he appeared in Jurassic Park, Sam Neill had already made a name for himself appearing in critically acclaimed movies like A Cry in the Dark (or Evil Angels as it’s also known), Dead Calm and The Hunt for Red October. But he still wasn’t a household name like Harrison Ford who Steven Spielberg originally sought for the role of Dr. Alan Grant.
Ford turned it down saying it wasn’t the type of role he wanted at the time. Many other big names had also turn down the role, which is good because the attraction of Jurassic Park isn’t the main protagonist, it’s the dinosaurs.
Jeff Goldblum plays the cool hotshot professor Dr. Ian Malcolm. Ford would’ve been too much of a distraction and equal to Goldblum. You need an actor who is going to be a friendly contradiction to Malcolm. Grant is a paleontologist. That means he’s more serious about his work. You need someone who would get too excited about their work they might bore their students. When Grant discusses how the dinosaurs may have change their sex when noticing the hatched egg shells, he does so with the zest and curiosity of a kid finding all he wants under the Christmas tree.
Paleontologists are diggers on their hands and knees carefully brushing away dirty and small rocks. With Ford, it’s Indiana Jones and the Island of Dinosaurs.
When he tells the volunteer kid at the dig site about how veliocraptors kill their prey, there’s a macabre style to it. Neill had played bad guys in Memoirs of an Invisble Man and a Soviet officer in both Red October and the ludicrously bloated miniseries Amerika. You could never tell if he was a good guy or bad guy. As Vasili Borodin, the executive officer of the Red October, he’s lived under Soviet rule his whole life that he’s had to put on a face that men are tough and strong. But when he talks to Sean Connery’s Marko Ramius about his dream life in Montana, again he acts like a kid telling his father or uncle about his true life goals.
Sadly Borodin is killed in the movie’s climatic final act which makes his character more sympathetic. During the Cold War, men like him in real life were told who to hate and how they were hated because of the world leaders wanted it that way.
Neill went on to appear in horror movies Event Horizon and In the Mouth of Madness, both of which received mixed reviews and weren’t commercial successes. However they have become cult favorites of sci-fi and horror fans over the years. He also played the the titular Merlin in the critically acclaimed miniseries in 1998 which was a retelling of the Arthurian legend from the point of view of the wizard.
He returned to play Grant in Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World: Dominion. Even though many other roles flew under the radar, Neill continued to work in film and on TV all over the world including his native New Zealand even while undergoing chemotherapy for angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma.
Earlier this year he had announced he was cancer free. However, he passed away from pneumonia on July 13 in Sydney, Australia. While I don’t want to speculate, I have heard of people who died from pneumonia after recovering from cancer as it does affect your immune system.
Neill and I shared the same birthday on Sept. 14 and even though he’s gone, he is still set to appear in Godzilla x Kong: Supernova.
But in film, you’re always immortal. And he will forever be Dr. Alan Grant never going extinct.
Zane Says 