Now Trending: Sam Neill

Half of X this week is playing a parlor game: name a Sam Neill movie that isn't Jurassic Park. It sounds like a throwaway prompt, and the replies read like one — Event Horizon, Hunt for Red October, The Piano, Sphere, The Dish, Omen III — but stack them up and you get a genuine surprise. This is a guy who's been quietly great in everything from Jane Campion arthouse cinema to a straight-faced Soviet submarine officer to the guy who got possessed and did something with a subway tunnel that half the internet still won't describe out loud. The other half of the timeline is arguing about something with real stakes: a New Zealand cabinet minister calling him, more or less, a hypocrite for opposing a gold mine.

The mine is real and the fight is real. A company called Santana Minerals wants to dig New Zealand's biggest gold discovery in four decades out of the ground near Bendigo in Central Otago — Neill's own backyard, where he's run an organic vineyard called Two Paddocks since the early 1990s. Resource minister Shane Jones and actor Sam Neill are on opposite sides of a public debate about a proposed gold mine. It would add billions of dollars to the national economy, but digging it up could kill 650,000 lizards and leave a picturesque landscape scarred for generations. Jones has been the mine's loudest cheerleader in government, going so far as to say "I'm not going to let juvenile lizards frustrate us at a time of economic challenge and economic hardships." Neill called the whole thing what he thinks it is: one of the loudest opposition voices, saying "All this land will completely change. Central Otago will completely change. And not for the better," in a documentary he made about it.

The argument escalated fast. Shane Jones took a potshot at New Zealand actor Sir Sam Neill after a lobby group posted a 2010 speech of Jones's calling out mining. Jones brushed off the hypocrisy charge by saying the country's circumstances have changed since then, and turned it back on Neill directly: he was critical of Sir Sam, who said the Santana proposal was "toxic," saying "I understand Sam Neill has been giving his thoughts about the landscape up there. But he does not own it." Neill has since said the personal attacks got ugly — "the amount of personal abuse that came in online, all over the shop, was frankly very shocking and disturbing, including threats of physical violence." He's also kept fundraising against the project, appearing at wine-country events to try to stop it before regulators rule, likely by mid-2026.

On the timeline, the sides split predictably along tribal lines. One camp — @McDonaldGinette's viral post is a good example — paints Jones as a "currant brained uncivil blob of greed" and Neill as a righteous defender of unspoiled land. The other side, less visible in this particular batch of tweets but loud in New Zealand itself, is the "we need the jobs" crowd: the mine promises hundreds of direct and flow-on positions in a region that could use them, and Jones has leaned hard into that framing every chance he gets. Buried under all of it is the fast-track approvals process itself — a government mechanism explicitly designed to speed permits like this one past the normal review gauntlet, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes people who don't trust Wellington any more than they trust Washington raise an eyebrow.

Here's my honest take: the "name a movie" game is fun but it's also a little insulting to a five-decade career, and I say that as someone who will always pick Event Horizon in a pinch. The mine fight is the more serious story, and it's a pretty clean case study in what the powerless actually see when they look at how development gets approved these days — not villains exactly, but a process built to give industry the benefit of every doubt while the people who live on the land get a fundraiser dinner and a strongly worded Instagram video. Whether or not you think the mine should get built, it's hard to blame a guy for being suspicious of a system where the fast track always seems to run in one direction.