Standing in line for Door B at Sydney Town Hall, I was approached by an over–jubilant couple who were wondering if this was the queue for Sydney Vivid Festival.
“It’s the line for Sam Neill!” I replied, performing some unsanctioned SWF volunteering.
“The Sam Neill?!” they responded, with sufficient levels of incredulity. I reassured them — yes, this was movie star, TV star, star of the stage, Sam Neill and they fled into the bracing night air — searching for Vivid, but ultimately impressed that Sydney Town Hall was hosting a different sort of bright, blinding luminary.
Who can blame them? As a Sam Neill superfan, the chance to see him live seemed almost too good to be true. But, after making my way beyond the threshold of the fabled Door B and to my south gallery seat, I started to believe in miracles.
The show itself started with a selfie. Neill, a veteran social media operator, insisted on snapping an audience backlit pic with interviewer, close friend, and Balmain Peninsula socialite Bryan Brown. This selfie set the tone for the evening — while the focus was on Neill, Brown was also a headlining act.
Brown isn’t a traditional interviewer, but his friendship and professional history with Neill made the evening feel more like an instalment of Variety’s Actors on Actors than a bog standard SWF tête-à-tête. While most of Brown’s questions and Neill’s answers trod the contents of Neill’s recently released memoir Did I Ever Tell You This? — traversing his early youth in Ireland, his name change from Nigel to Sam, and some choice moments from his time in Australia and New Zealand’s filmic ascendancy — there were glimmers of divergence.
The pair discussed their experience acting in Ken Cameron’s The Good Wife (1987) — which surely explains Brown’s 2012 cameo in CBS’s legal-political serial drama of the same name — and the fictional throuple of Neill, Brown, and Brown’s wife Rachel Ward. Many chortles all round.
They later recounted a lavish, all-expenses paid industry festival junket to Italy where Neill, Brown, and 28 other Australian actors were wined and dined by organisers and the press. Brown did the heavy-lifting for this anecdote, but Neill chimed in near the end with some choice remarks from Barry Humphries (accompanied by a brief foray into the legacy of the man himself).
But not all the tales necessarily involved Sam Neill, as Brown evidenced with his delightful tale of a coerced audition for Roger Donaldson’s Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise.
The incestuousness of so many of Neill and Brown’s experiences speaks to how intimate Australia’s expanding film industry was in the 80s. And while the evening was ostensibly about Sam Neill, his story, especially the story of his professional life, is difficult to tell without wrangling an unruly cast of side characters — Brown most prominent among them.
Much like his book, which started as a series of anecdotes committed to writing after Neill received a worrying cancer diagnosis, Sam Neill: Did I Ever Tell You This? was an insightful evening of interlinking anecdotes. In broad and detailed strokes, they painted a rich personal life, a successful professional career, and an Australian film industry starkly different to the one we have today. But after having read his book and attended his event, I can safely say that, yes, you did tell me that.
P.S. His favourite dinosaur is the T-Rex!
