I Refuse To Believe That Laura Dern Didn’t Realise That Sam Neill Was Two Decades Older Than Her
Actors don't see age!
I love a good cultural reckoning, don’t you?
And here’s the latest: amid the release of their new movie, the original Jurassic Park couple Laura Dern and Sam Neill have just realised that they are 20 years apart in age, and in retrospect, that may have been inappropriate!
“I am 20 years older than Laura!” Neill apparently blurted out in an interview about the new Jurassic Park movie with the UK publication The Times. “Which at the time [1993] was a completely appropriate age difference for a leading man and lady. It never occurred to me until I opened a magazine and there was an article called ‘Old geezers and gals’.” (Are you sure that was the name of the article, Sam Neill?)
“People like Harrison Ford and Sean Connery acting with much younger people. And there I was, on the list. I thought, ‘Come on. It can’t be true.’”
The interviewer says that Dern then took over, stating, “Well, it felt completely appropriate to fall in love with Sam Neill. And it was only now, when we returned in a moment of cultural awareness about the patriarchy, that I was, like, ‘Wow! We’re not the same age?’”
Our guess is that Laura Dern is probably being polite. She says that she was 23 years old when she filmed the 1993 science fiction film, which means that Neill was 43. My feeling is that there’s no 23-year-old on earth that wouldn’t notice that their onscreen love interest was old enough to be their (young) Dad. Plus, I feel like women knew about patriarchy in the ’90s, too. Especially actresses.
Sam Neill’s obliviousness though, I can somehow buy.
Jurassic World Dominion hits Australian cinemas on June 9, 2022.