Poor Sam Neill just found out that the first dinosaur Alan Grant ever saw in Jurassic Park is dead
The Brachiosaurus sighting is one of the 1993 movie's most memorable scenes
Aux News Sam Neill
Since the first Jurassic Park movie in 1993, paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant has been winning over audiences with his deep knowledge of dinosaurs. Over the years since he first started playing the role, Sam Neill has seemingly developed a similar affection for the creatures that are, thankfully, still extinct in our world.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the New Zealand-born actor was asked to look back at the iconic scene where Grant turns paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler’s head (Laura Dern) around when they arrive at the park and see a Brachiosaurus for the first time. Their portrayal of awe, alongside Jeff Goldblum as chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm, has made the clip memorable for nearly 30 years.
“I said to Steven [Spielberg], ‘Look, after a lifetime of imagining dinosaurs, to actually see a dinosaur, Alan Grant just might flat out faint,’” Neill recalls, noting that the scientist wouldn’t be much of an action hero. “And Steven said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So that’s why you see me stagger around and I have to sit down and put my head between my legs.”
In the upcoming Jurassic World: Dominion, Neill, Dern, and Goldblum are finally reuniting onscreen, alongside the franchise’s new faces Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. However, they won’t be joined by that first Brachiosaurus, which met its downfall in 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, when a volcanic eruption devastated Isla Nublar. The Hollywood Reporter had to break the bad news to Neill.
“Well, that is heartbreaking,” Neill says. “Such a sweet creature.”
Grant was last seen in 2001's Jurassic Park III, and despite his passion for research, Neill hints that Dominion finds the character apprehensive about the new age of dinosaurs.
“He’s turned his back on a new world in which dinosaurs are so much a part of human existence,” Neill says. “He’s always regarded all of that as something of an aberration. So he is in his crusty tent doing his crusty digging. He’s a scientist. He believes in facts.”
Jurassic World: Dominion is in theaters this weekend. Elsewhere in the dino-verse, the fifth and final season of the animated series Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous arrives on Netflix on July 21.
52 Comments
I love Sam Neil.
Watch Amerika — the 1980s mini-series that was sort of like The Man in the High Castle only about a Soviet takeover of the US (it’s more like that than Red Dawn because it is set a decade or so after the takeover and is about the occupation rather than the invasion itself). Sam Neil plays a Soviet administrator who actually isn’t a bad guy — he wants to actually help the Americans rebuild (under Soviet mentorship, but still) but his bosses in the Kremlin have no interest in that. Anyway, it’s a fairly obscure performance by Neil (and probably led to him being cast as the sailor who wanted to see Montana in The Hunt for Red October).
my favorite obscure (?) Sam Neill movie was Dead Calm with a super young (actually probably MORE age inappropriate for him than Laura Dern in JP) Nicole Kidman as his wife and Billy Zane as the wacko they had to deal with. He had half the movie to himself trying to survive a really difficult situation and it was just as compelling as Nicole Kidman’s half. Even then he struck me as an Australian Tom Hanks—good, smart, tough when needed.
Love that movie. Also shout out to “Possession” which is… it gets pretty wild.
An Australian Tom Hanks? The man is New Zealand’s national treasure. I don’t think you could have insulted him or his country more!
Isn’t insulting New Zealand one of Australia’s major national pastimes, though?
That, and getting them to build our scaffolding.
and claiming their best and brightest as your own: See: Crowded House, Sam Neill, Russell Crowe, Barnaby Joyce etc.
Barnaby Joyce Which is ironic that he preferenced One Nation on the ol’ How To Vote cards a few weeks back: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/10/barnaby-joyce-one-nation-preferences-pauline-hanson-how-to-vote-card-australia-election-2022
I did some work in New Zealand back in the day and at a bar one night with my work chums I made a comment that, to Americans, Australians and New Zealanders sounded alike. Had I not been needed to complete a job, in fairly certain they would have booted me out of the country on the spot. 🙂
LOL sorry, didn’t realize there was such a beef between New Zealand and Australia, thought you guys were like the US and Canada…wait, another bad example. LOL
Obscure to people who aren’t Australian maybe but we know it quite well. At least those of us more than *ahem* years old.(I don’t know how well Dead Calm is known in New Zealand.)
I think Dead Calm was the first I saw of Sam Neill, and I know it was the first time I saw Nicole Kidman. It’s a good movie – suspenseful and scary at times with a love story (a grownup one, with a tragedy and other difficulties) at the center of it. There are genuinely creepy moments in it, like the in-the-background video tape showing why and how Billy Zane ended up on his boat alone. (Hint – it’s not ‘cause he was a pleasant shipmate.)And Neill was SO good in Reilly, Ace of Spies – check it out if you can find it.
I actually thought Sam Neill’s storyline was more engrossing than Nicole Kidman’s because as one bad thing after another happened to him, he never seemed to stop working to solve the problem. If he had been trapped on Mars with Matt Damon they would probably have flown home a year earlier LOL.
Then watch The Dish. Sam Neil, Patrick Warburton in fine Generic Mid-Century G-Man form, Kevin Harrington, the legendary Roy Billing, and the late, great Tom Long (RIP). “We just bullshitted NASA.”Plus, has a pretty good rendition of the American National Anthem. One of my big regrets was not heading down to Parkes to watch this at The Dish in 2019, on the anniversary of the moonwalk.
God I love that movie. That soundtrack is amazing.
Absolutely.
I want to see this but it looks like it’s only available on VHS or pirated YouTube.
Yes. I watched it back in the day on TV, and a couple of years ago on youtube.
Was the quality ok on YouTube? Last time I watched a whole feature on there the speed and the picture were all off.
It was watchable at least, imho, although your mileage might vary. I’m the sort of guy who watches a version of “The Winds of War” miniseries on youtube that was obviously digitized from someone’s personal videotaping of it off the air, with all the artifacts that implies.
I’m curious enough to give it a try.
Unfortunately, there’s not a proper release of Amerika anywhere. There’s some fuzzy copies on YouTube, but that’s about it.
I wish I had held onto the VHS copies I had from when it aired, but they got lost somewhere when I loaned them to the wrong person.
I do as well, he was great in the mouth of madness and Event Horizon.
Two of my faves!
Don’t forget My Brilliant Career. So young!
His twitter is absolutely charming. Just him on his farm with his animals.
I love Sam too, but if you ever go drinking with him, whatever you do don’t let him have a glass of Tokay wine.
Not enough to spell his name correctly though.
Oops.
Even worse than being dead, that dinosaur was not only fictional, but also CGI!
It could be brought back to life but finding a computer running early 90s IRIX and Softimage 2.0 might be harder than finding DNA in an amberized mosquito.
But… wait… this is UNIX! I know this!
You have no idea how bad I want to recase my PC in a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 case…
Looking at the cast list for the new one on IMDB last night and realizing that Sam Neill is now older than Attenborough was in the first one was a sobering moment.
Here is one for ya – Toby Maguire was 42 in the latest Spiderman movie, that is the same age that Willem DaFoe was in the first Spiderman movie.
Danny Glover was only 40 when he did the first Lethal Weapon as well. I don’t even want to think about the present day implications for myself with this fact.
I had the same realization this week when I found out that the main catalyst for the vacation in City Slickers was Billy Crystal’s character turning 39.
Next year, I turn Paul Giamatti’s crisis age in Sideways (37) and I’m just blown away cause I still have all my hair.
This reminds me of a story my girlfriend tells about the first time she took her son to the zoo. He was pretty young, maybe five or six, and in the car on the way there she asked him, “So what animal are you most excited to see today, kiddo?” and he immediately answered, “The triceratops!”After she told him he cried the whole rest of the car ride.
What did he think all this time it was at a dinosaur farm up north where it had lots of space to…lumber around?
Dead as a… dinosaur?
Ironically, all his doornails are doing just fine.
Y’know, it never occurred to me that any of the dinos at Jurassic World could be survivors of the original park.
Alan Grant saw the brachiosaurus.Sam Neill was looking at nothing when they shot that scene.
So in this movie, does his accent land on American, Kiwi or somewhere in between? He really should just play more Kiwis or something because damned if he can hold an accent other than his own.
I assume in between like the original. Appernetly he tried full Kiwi first and Steve was like “no one can understand you”
“Amerikiwi”!
I mean even if the volcano didn’t kill it, what is the life span of one of those monsters. I doubt it’s 30 years.
Sauropods were once estimated to have lifespans like giant tortoises (centuries) but this has been revised down to something like 70-80 years (similar to elephants).
The oldest-T.Rex fossils are estimated to be 30-something. Of course, the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Who knows what impact the cloning process had on life expectancy.
In general, larger animals have longer lifespans.