Sam Neill's celebrity-named pets and his 'peaceful vines'

With Taika Waititi the pig, Meryl Streep the chook, homemade fruit jam and a growing wine brand, the Hunt for the Wilderpeople star found solace "away from show business" at his farm and vineyard in Otago.

Caption:Sir Sam Neill found peace and comfort at his Central Otago farm and vineyard.Photo credit:RNZ / Samuel Rillstone

When the late actor Sir Sam Neill wasn’t filming, he was a Central Otago resident famously in charge of Two Paddocks farm and vineyard, surrounded by celebrity-named animals and wondrous vistas stretching out to St Bathans.

“Now I’m back among these peaceful vines, and I couldn't be happier,” Sir Sam once told Country Life reporter Sally Round in 2022 after a trip doing his “day job” in Brisbane.

Sir Sam’s family history with the region extends back to when his great grandfather landed here in 1861, with several members going back to serve with the British Army. After his solider father returned to New Zealand in 1955, Sir Sam recalled “the old seer” would often lament, during their holiday trips to the region, on why people didn’t grow grapes there.

“I always thought, this is where I'd love to live,” Sir Sam told Nine to Noon in 2025. “Once my career started going, I realised that I could actually buy some land and build a house. So I've lived there ever since. I think that was probably 1985 or something, I built that house.”

The government “experimental” farm, which he bought in 1993, was used to research which crops would grow in the region. Sir Sam said he managed to retain a lavender still, where he made organic lavender oil. “I like to bathe in, like Cleopatra, with lavender water in my bath water,” he laughed.

He also had an array of fruits – cherries, plums and apricots. “I make jam at Christmas time, and I've got a veggie garden over there. Everything's organic here, and you can hear the birds enjoying themselves as a result.” Some of his most recent Instagram posts from June showed him harvesting olives and serenading cattle.

Famous pet pals: ‘They always like to be on radio’

Sir Sam would often post online about his pet pals whom he affectionately named after famous friends and colleagues, including Helena Bonham Carter (a cow), Taika Waititi (a pig), ABC Melbourne Drive presenter Charlie Pickering (a duck), Nicole Kidman, Michael Fassbender (a rooster), Sir Michael Caine, Meryl Streep, Usain Bolt (chooks) and Susan Sarandon (a sheep).

The Jurassic Park actor also said in his interviews naming them after famous figures meant they wouldn’t end up on the plate – although he wasn’t a vegan.

“I think my animals were more popular than me,” Neil told Nine to Noon’s Kathryn Ryan.

“The real Helena's an old friend of mine. She's delighted to have a cow named after her. And a very fertile cow I might say. I thought it was something like eight calves that she'd had over the years. Turns out it's been 16.”

“I haven't had any blowback from that [naming the animals],” Neil told Country Life. “There's been one or two unfortunate incidents. Hugo Weaving, who was a ram of mine, died on the job. He fell off the back of a ewe one day and we had to find a replacement for Hugo…

“[Angelica, the pig, has] fathered quite a number of little piglets... We've been friends for 15 years now and we have no secrets from each other. We sit down and have a chat in the sun.”

More than names, the actor liked to have fun with them. One time he even posted about doing a bit of yoga alongside his pigs. He said he just wanted to put a smile on people’s faces.

“There's some ducks who might like to make an appearance,” Sir Sam told Country Life’s Sally Round as she toured Two Paddocks. “They always like to be on radio.”

“These are Peking ducks, so I go ‘mmm, mmm crispy’ when I walk past and they hardly flinch because they know I'm a softie,” he said as the ducks quacked in the background. “No, they're all my pets and I love them.”

Australian radio host Charlie Pickering paid tribute to Sir Sam after his death, saying he was the first person who agreed to go on The Weekly show. After that interview, Sir Sam named his favourite duck after the host.

“Every morning, to keep fit, Sam Neil would swim around the dam on his property and Charlie Pickering the duck would jump in the water and swim laps next to Sam” Pickering said on ABC Melbourne. “It was that day that both Sam and I found out that Charlie the Pickering was in fact a girl because she had laid some eggs.”

‘Favourite wine in my favourite place’

In recollecting how he became a vineyard owner, Sir Sam told Nine to Noon he sort of stumbled into it – much in the same way he became an actor. While it was his Ivanhoe co-star James Mason who introduced him to Bourgogne and led his interest in Pinot Noir, Sir Sam’s family was in the wine business for 150 years, he said.

“I suppose I have a sort of informal role as a kind of semi-ambassador for New Zealand wine abroad and, yeah, I enjoy that,” Neil told Country Life.

“The one thing that I'm very sort of hypersensitive to is when people call my wine ‘celebrity wines’, like I'm Olivia Newton-John and I put my name on a label. It's never been that.

“I've been deeply involved in what we do here since day one and fully committed to what we do, and it's got nothing to do with my profile really. It's to do with the work and the people I have working with me like Mike and Jacqui here and Dean Shaw, my winemaker, obviously.”

Fourteen years after that introduction, Sir Sam couldn’t resist the idea of growing “my favourite wine in my favourite place”.

“We sell out every year. That can be problematic in terms of cash flow, but, you know, there are worse problems than being sold out, I can tell you that.”

Rolling with the punches of Mother Nature at the farm and vineyard sometimes had him dreaming up “a nice job in somewhere like Spain”, but he reckoned it was “kind of scary in a nice way”.

“You take the good with the bad,” he said. And most importantly, it was “away from show business”.

“There's no money in wine,” Sir Sam told 30 with Guyon Espiner. “But having said that, Two Paddocks has become this very recognised and I think successful brand around the world. And at such times as I shuffle off, I'd like to think that's my legacy as much as anything.”

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