Sam Neill The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Sam Neill was forty-two years old when The Hunt for Red October opened, three years before Jurassic Park (1993) made him an international star and twelve years past My Brilliant Career (1979) which had established him as one of the leading actors of the Australian New Wave. He played Captain Vasily Borodin, Ramius's executive officer and the film's most quietly heartbreaking performance.
A career built across three industries
Neill was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in Northern Ireland in 1947 and raised in New Zealand from age seven. He studied English literature at the University of Canterbury before drifting into acting and film production. Sleeping Dogs (1977), Roger Donaldson's debut, was his first lead. My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite Judy Davis, was his breakthrough, and Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981) was his first Hollywood role, cast as the adult Damien Thorn.
Through the 1980s he worked across the British, Australian, and American industries — Plenty (1985) opposite Meryl Streep, Dead Calm (1989) opposite Nicole Kidman, A Cry in the Dark (1988). By 1989, when McTiernan cast him as Borodin, Neill was a respected character actor with a face that read as European, professional, and slightly wary — exactly right for a Soviet executive officer.
"Sam has the face of a man who has just heard something terrible and is deciding what to do about it. That face is the whole reason to cast him." — Roger Donaldson, Sight & Sound (1995)
What Borodin does in the film
Borodin is Ramius's second-in-command and his only confidant inside the conspiracy. He is the officer Ramius trusts to engage the caterpillar drive, the man who reports the cryogenic plant failure, the friend who tells Ramius after the Slavin confrontation that informing Moscow may have been an error. He is also the carrier of the film's emotional payload.
The Montana scene (beat 25) is Neill's career-best work. Borodin asks Ramius if they will let him live in Montana. Ramius says yes. Borodin builds the vision: a round American woman, rabbits, a pickup truck, a recreational vehicle, traveling state to state. Neill plays the entire monologue with a small smile and the slightly distracted look of a man who has been imagining this scene for months and is finally permitted to say it out loud.
"I would like to have seen Montana." — Captain Borodin (Sam Neill), final words, The Hunt for Red October (1990)
The five-word death line — "I would like to have seen Montana" — collapses the entire fantasy into past-perfect grief. Neill delivers it without theatrics, eyes closing on a dream that will not be reached. Connery's Ramius reacts to it with a single line and a hand on Borodin's chest. The scene is over in twenty seconds. It is the most devastating in the film.
"Neill's Borodin is the film's heart, and his death is the structural cost of the defection. Ramius gets across. Borodin does not. That is the price of every defection in human history — that someone close to you does not make it." — Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central (2018)
After Red October
Neill's career exploded with Jurassic Park (1993) — Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel, in which Neill played paleontologist Alan Grant. The role made him an international leading man at age forty-six. The Piano (1993, Jane Campion) the same year cemented his reputation as a serious dramatic actor capable of playing complicated, damaged men.
The 1990s and 2000s included In the Mouth of Madness (1995, John Carpenter), Event Horizon (1997), Bicentennial Man (1999), Yes (2004), Skin (2008), and television work on Peaky Blinders. He returned to the Jurassic franchise for Jurassic World Dominion (2022). In 2023 he disclosed a stage III blood cancer diagnosis but continued working. He has also become an unlikely social media presence, posting from his vineyard in Central Otago, New Zealand, under the handle @TwoPaddocks.
"Sam Neill is one of the few movie stars who is also genuinely good company. He has been quietly brilliant for fifty years. Borodin is somewhere in the top five things he ever did." — Jane Campion, The Guardian (2023)