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The stars ofJurassic Parkface constant danger onscreen, but according toSam Neillin his new memoirDid I Ever Tell You This?, they had a near-death experience filming the firstJurassic Parkmovie in Hawaii in September 1992.
“We almost died in the first few weeks where we were filming on Kauai in the Hawaiian archipelago,” Neill, 75, wrote. “One morning we were told to stay back at the hotel and expect a hurricane later in the day. I was down on the beach withLaura Dern, who asked me: ‘Sam, do you think we might die today?’ As these massive black clouds approached over the Pacific I found I had to tell her that in all honesty the answer was yes, I thought we might.”
“It turned out we came very close,” he added.
The New Zealander recalled how the cast and crew tried to stay safe during the hurricane, named Iniki.
“They herded us into a ballroom, all the cast and crew, a few hours before Hurricane Iniki hit us,” he wrote. “Iniki was a Category 4 hurricane and it absolutely wrecked the island, including all our sets. Six people died, and it caused more than $3 billion worth of damage.”
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According to the Red Cross viaCNN, the storm also damaged or destroyed 14,350 homes on Kauai.
After a few days, Neill and theJurassicteam flew back to Los Angeles to continue filming in a studio before heading back to Hawaii to do some more scenes on the Big Island.
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Neill admitted he had a bit of imposter syndrome while working on that firstJurassicmovie.
“The impostor syndrome would be enhanced later on when we were out and about promoting the movie; the more or less official line from Universal Pictures was that, withJurassic Park, they had set out to prove that they, with Spielberg, could make huge blockbusters without ‘movie stars,’ " he wrote. “This was true enough, but I think it slightly irked us, the actors, to be reminded from time to time we were not real ‘stars.’ "
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Neill wrote that costars Dern, 56, andJeff Goldblumwent on to become his “lifelong friends.” He also calledChris Pratt, who joined the franchise in 2015’sJurassic World, “absolutely fantastic as a hero.”
“He’s really thought about what it means to be an action hero,” Neill wrote. “It’s a real job. I never did that on theJurassicfilms. On the contrary, I thought I was playing an ordinary guy who finds himself in a heap of trouble and muddles his way to survival.”
Neill returned for two moreJurassicinstallments, but he doesn’t think the movies impacted his career in a major way.
“It was great to be in such a success, and I owe so much to Spielberg and everyone involved, but I don’t think theJurassicseries made any seismic shift in my career,” the two-time Emmy nominee wrote. “I didn’t become Mr. Action Hero or anything, though there is a weird action-man figurine from 1992 in which a muscular version of me wears peculiar underpants.”
Did I Ever Tell You This?is out now.
source: people.com
