Noted Wine Enthusiast Sam Neill Explains Why He Agreed To Do ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ (Two Bottles Of Wine)

As Jurassic World: Dominion opens wide in theaters, franchise veteran Sam Neill is opening up about how director Colin Trevorrow talked him into returning to the series after a nearly 20 year absence: Namely, through a whole lot of wine.

Neill famously played paleontologist Alan Grant in the original Jurassic Park, and after sitting out The Lost World, he returned for the underrated 2001 gem, Jurassic Park III. Since then, Neill admits that he never thought much about returning to the franchise even when the Jurassic World films started up with Chris Pratt in the lead. However, that changed when Trevorrow took Neill out to lunch during a film festival, and the actor didn’t even try to hide how he was talked into joining the cast of Dominion. Via The Wrap:

I think it was October of 2019. I got a Lifetime Award at the Stiges Film Festival, which is devoted to fantasy, horror, and sci-fi, and stuff like that. And Colin turned up for that and took me out for lunch and basically talked me into it. He was persuasive that all these characters would be central to what happens in the story, they’d have their own storylines and so on.

Was there anything in particular he said that swayed you

Look, I liked him enormously, and also we had two bottles of wine. That helps.

Of course, Neill also said that a major sticking point was that he “wasn’t going to come in and do a cameo,” which Trevorrow addressed, but clearly, the wine helped. Sam Neill loves him some vino. Case in point: