Sam Neill may never have practised law but he has spent a large amount of time circling the profession, as though the legal world kept trying to recruit him before Hollywood arrived with dinosaurs and better catering.
Before Jurassic Park, before the vineyard, before the endlessly reposted photos with farm animals, Sam Neill, who died this week, had been a first‑year law student who may have become a courtroom rather than a cinema performer.
The encouragement to study law came from celebrated Christchurch barrister Brian McClelland who, according to a report on the conversation, McClelland said: ‘The only career for you, my boy, is the law. You need to be in court.’
Neill said he took him seriously. “Because it’s not many people that take you seriously when you are 19. And so I did law for a year with absolutely catastrophic results.”
He concluded that he neither had “the brain or the application” to pull it off, according to a 2024 Spinoff profile.
Neill said repeatedly that he thought there was “a secret lawyer” inside him and that, in another life, he might have become a barrister because he enjoyed the performative side of advocacy and public speaking.
He also acknowledged that he was a childhood stammerer, which made the idea of courtroom advocacy seem improbable, later reflecting that acting and legal advocacy shared the same reliance on performance and persuasion
Neill left those exam scripts behind to build a stellar career that has run from his first notable feature Sleeping Dogs, The Piano to Peaky Blinders and, of course, Jurassic Park, cementing his status as one of Australia and New Zealand’s screen powerhouses.
Yet the legal itch never completely went away according to the Spinoff report, with an acting gig that finally allowed him to be “a pretend lawyer”.
That “pretend lawyer” found his fullest expression in the Australian courtroom drama The Twelve, built around a murder trial and the messy private lives of 12 jurors. Neill played a silk at the top of his game, defending a controversial artist accused of killing her teenage niece a shark‑eyed, battle‑hardened defence lawyer. The Twelve ran from 2022 to 2025.
Neill’s performance in The Twelve is restrained, pragmatic, almost weary and closer to the senior advocates found pacing real‑world courts than to the grandstanding TV caricatures lawyers like to complain about.
Neill’s almost‑legal origin story is an oddly comforting parable about failure. The would‑be barrister who bombed his papers ended up inhabiting a version of that career on a much larger stage, with a global audience sizing up his cross‑examinations. And his notable cinematic achievements.
