The only role Sam Neill regrets turning down because he “did’t get it”
When you’ve chased off flying dinosaurs, experienced invisible men and climbed inside the mind of a mad writer, you know you’ve done it all as an actor. That’s all from one man, New Zealand’s Sam Neill, who’s best known for his role as the level-headed, unbiased palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original Jurassic Park.
The actor, now 77, has spent over 40 years onscreen as the leading man in series like The Twelve, Jane Campion’s 1993 classic, The Piano and Australian director Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career. However, Neill has also dabbled in twisted indie cinema like Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession and sci-fi movies, showing his penchant for the weird and supernatural in John Carpenter films, like In the Mouth of Madness and Memoirs of an Invisible Man. His dedication to this genre earned him an award in 2019 at the Sitges Film Festival, which celebrated his “lifetime services” to sci-fi.
Despite his outlandish and diverse character repertoire, there was one role that was slightly too out there for even Neill’s taste at the time, which was the role of a transgender Australian woman Bernadette in Stephen Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a 1994 Australian smash hit musical comedy.
The film follows Bernadette Bassinger, a recently bereaved transgender woman who ventures through the Australian Outback in a tour bus named Priscilla with two drag queens. Neill was initially supposed to play the role of Bernadette, but turned it down because, in his words, he “didn’t get it”. The actor insisted the decision wasn’t about drag, but instead about the script just not being very funny. In retrospect, he admitted he had “made a mistake”, adding, “It turned out to be such a wonderful film. That was my one regret”.
The role of Bernadette ended up going to the British actor, Terence Stamp, who passed this month at 87, leaving a huge body of work behind. Priscilla became one of his best films, and in a statement online after his death, the director and friend Stephen Elliott remarked on Stamp’s extraordinary turn in the film: “Those eyes turned everyone to jelly”.
However, the role wasn’t easy for Stamp, according to Elliott, who said that the actor struggled with his own feelings towards the character, reportedly having all mirrors removed during filming. But he grew into the role, eventually learning to love Bernadette, a journey which makes the character’s trajectory in the film even more moving.
Priscilla won both an Academy Award and a Bafta, with Stamp nominated for ‘Best Actor’ at the Baftas but failing to land the win, and was a daring piece of cinema for a time when America was coming out of the grips of an AIDS epidemic and transgender people were still marginalised and stigmatised. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Stamp delivers a musical performance of CeCe Peniston’s ‘Finally’, alongside his two co-stars, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce, which serves as a grand finale, a joyous celebration of life, dealing with grief and its many absurdities.
Priscilla was released a year after Jurassic Park, and, although it wasn’t meant to be, would have been a huge swing for Sam Neill, who has since continued to star in the Jurassic Park franchise, including the 1997, 2001 and 2022 sequels. His latest project, Untamed, was released on Netflix in August, an American drama murder mystery set in Yosemite National Park in which Neill plays the chief park ranger, starring alongside Eric Bana and Rosemarie DeWitt.
