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Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel mourn the loss of Sam Neill, and celebrate his exceptional skill and technique in imbuing the impossible with a human sense of reality. As of this taping, Sam Neill’s final film project is slated to be Gozilla x Kong: Supernova (to be released in 2027); Jordan and Pete break down why of course he is the actor anyone would want for that, and trace that path through several film roles and evidence from the public aspect of his personal life.

For Sam Neill as well as anyone ever has, looked at nothing, and by the looking, made it real. To the eyes watching the eyes of Sam Neill watching, the fantastical becomes the fantastic. Jordan and Pete discuss this work in, of course, Jurassic Park, but also in horror touchstones Event Horizon and In the Mouth of Madness.

The two then break down other, similar performances that succeed or fail at this technique. Of course there’s Brendan Frasier, whose excellence at it is well known, but further focus and analysis is directed, as it perhaps too rarely is, at The Desolation of Smaug and Bride of Chucky in quick succession.

And finally Jordan and Pete muse on Sam Neill’s excellence at the art of mirroring as it applies to a more practical real-world challenge, the leap of faith toward common understanding, even love, between humans and non-human animals. Sam Neill was a well-known and public animal lover, in particular known for his love for his pet pigs, and Jordan and Pete parse the hope and challenge of such a commitment, from the existential courage to love the unknowable, to the cultural peril of extrapolating familiarity from fiction.

For as the lungs of the triceratops fill and empty, we all rise and fall with the bliss of a child borne in its mother’s dinosaur arms.

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Further Reading

• Sam Neill, Leading Man of Jurassic Park, Dies at 78, by Natasha Frost and Zachary Woolf in The New York Times
• The Sick Triceratops Scene
• The Hunt for Red October: Living in America
• Acting at the unreal to imbue it with reality, examples:
  • Sam Neill Meets the Dinosaurs
  • Sam Neill Loses His Mind Riding a Bus
  • Brendan Fraser vs. the Mummy Army
  • Martin Freeman with Smaug
  • Jennifer Tilly with Chucky
• Three Animated Gifs of Sam Neill Being Held at Gunpoint by What We Are Led to Believe Is Invisible Chevy Chase, from Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), courtesy of fyproprietor on Tumblr
• Research Starter: Ethology, by Michael, A. Steele, 2024, on EBESCO
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat, by Thomas Nagel, Originally Published in The Philosophical Review, Volume 83, No. 4, Oct. 1974, Duke University Press, re-hosted by The University of Pennsylvania
• 10,000 Dreams | 1504 | Sam Neill, from 10,000 Dreams on YouTube