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  • New Zealand Listener

    The lizard wizard

    Jun 05, 2022 7 minutes
    by RUSSELL BAILLIE

    Among his many achievements on screen, Sam Neill was in two Jurassic Park films and didn’t get eaten. A little bloodied and bruised, but otherwise undigested. Now he’s back for one last escapade in Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth and final in the franchise.

    It’s 30 years since he first played Dr Alan Grant, the man who took on a T-Rex while armed only with a distress flare in what ranks as one of the best scenes by Steven Spielberg, a man whose career doesn’t lack for such moments. It was the first of Grant’s many close encounters with the creatures. These days, the 74-year-old who plays him empathises with those prehistoric lizards.

    “I’m just a dinosaur,” he laughs down the line from Sydney. That’s when the Listener points out that Kiwis doing well in Hollywood might be commonplace these days, but with Jurassic Park he was essentially the first.

    There have been screen landmarks at home, too. Back in 1977, his debut feature, kick-started the New Zealand film industry. He made , the spirited documentary about how our national identity was expressed in our movies. He played Uncle Hec in , the biggest local film of all

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