The article republishes what is presented as Sam Neill’s final interview with the Guardian after his death at 78, using readers’ questions to reflect on his career, personality and memories from film sets. It matters because it offers a last, personal portrait of a widely admired actor, combining humour and warmth with more sombre reflections on ageing, grief and the people he worked with.

Neill recalls drawing on a lifetime around dogs for his role in Dean Spanley, including stories about his rescue dog Fire and the chaos of flying her between New Zealand and Australia. He also speaks affectionately about Robin Williams on Bicentennial Man, describing both his relentless comic energy and the sadness he sensed in private moments. On Jurassic Park, he says the film’s realism came from a blend of early CGI and large animatronic creatures built by Stan Winston, joking that during the T rex attack scene he sometimes worried more about the mechanical dinosaur, whose teeth occasionally fell out and needed repair.