Nick Romano is a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.
One of the big reasons Sam Neill wanted to do Xfinity's Super Bowl commercial, which recreates iconic scenes from Jurassic Park, was the reunion with costars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum.
"That's always a pleasure. It doesn't happen enough," Neill tells Entertainment Weekly in a brief interview about the Big Game ad. "We're good friends, but when you think about it, we couldn't live further apart. I'm in New Zealand, Jeff is in Italy, and Laura is in L.A. now. I don't think you can spread out the world more than that."
Neill's favorite recollection of bonding with his Jurassic Park cast mates coincides with the most treacherous moment on set: Hurricane Iniki tearing through their Hawaii filming locations in September of 1992.
"We'd been working in Hawaii for a week or 10 days, and we went down to report for duty at 6:30 in the morning or whatever it is," the actor, who played paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant, recalls. "And they said, 'We're not going to work today...There's a hurricane coming.'"
Neill remembers "it all went very still," noting how "the tide went out a bit."
"Laura and I went down to the beach, and she said, 'Do you think we might die today?' And I said, 'I think that's entirely possible,'" he shares.
The cast spent several hours that day hunkered down in the ballroom of the resort. "Because it traveled very fast, it wasn't a very damaging hurricane, but it did a lot of damage when it was right over the top of us," Neill remembers. "It destroyed our sets, and it meant we had to travel back to L.A. in two or three days when a plane could actually land -- 'cause the airport was covered in dead trees and things."
It was during those few days waiting for an aircraft, Neill adds, that their core trio, plus director Steven Spielberg -- "who can be very, very entertaining," the actor says -- "had nothing to do except entertain each other."
Neill agrees that, when you survive a hurricane together, everything after that feels like a cakewalk. "I've been through a few semi-disasters on films, but that's the closest we actually came to death," he says.
The Xfinity Super Bowl ad, airing this Sunday during the NFL extravaganza, sees Neill back as Alan, Dern back as paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, and Goldblum back as chaos theory mathematician Ian Malcolm. The commercial imagines what Jurassic Park might've looked like if the island had been powered by Xfinity's reliable Wi-Fi network. Instead of all the man-eating dinosaurs breaking free of their exhibits, everything remained hunky-dory, and the guests actually enjoyed their time at the resort.
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The trio shot the ad in California, while Xfinity worked closely with NBCUniversal to recreate specific costumes, set pieces, music, and scenes from the original film.
"Nothing I was wearing [in the ad] was original," Neill clarifies, noting how he auctioned off his Timberland boots and Dominion hat, among other Jurassic props, for charity. "So they made me a new uniform. I did not keep it this time, just in case they want another reunion."
Neill also commented on the new Jurassic franchise entry, last year's Jurassic World Rebirth. He described the film as "a family affair," since he played the onscreen father of Scarlett Johansson in 1998's The Horse Whisperer. Johansson led the cast of the latest movie as special-ops expert Zora Bennett. "I feel like my daughter, she's capable of kicking any ass," Neill said. "She gets it from me."
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