One of the first scenes in Jurassic Park shows us Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant scaring a young boy. It’s played for a laugh, of course, as he takes a raptor claw and holds it up to a mouthy kid at a fossil dig site. As the terrified child looks on as Grant explains what a velociraptor does to its prey, it’s pretty clear that this is a man who really doesn’t like children. Little do we know that this would be part of his arc in the film. By the time Steven Spielberg‘s Jurassic Park ends, the same man is asleep in a helicopter with a nine-year-old’s head on one shoulder and a thirteen-year-old’s on the other, and an arm around each of them.
Sam Neill died on 13 July 2026 at 78, and in the days since, the two actors who played those young children in Jurassic Park, Joseph Mazzello (who was nine when he played Tim Murphy) and Ariana Richards (who was thirteen when she played Lex) have written beautiful tributes to the actor who “only pretended he hated us.”
Mazzello, who is now 42 years old, holds back tears in his video tribute, calling Neill a playful scene partner who ad-libbed with his two much younger co-stars and matched them climb for climb through the film’s tree and fence chase sequences. He also recalled that Neill recently commented on one of his posts, writing, “All the best Joey.”
“I didn’t even know he was following me. I didn’t know that he even thought about me anymore,” Mazzello says in the video, clearly touched by Neill’s caring nature. “But he was rooting for me. He was still rooting for me 33 years later. That was so special to me to know that.”
The actress who played his sister in the film, Ariana Richards, now 46, also had nothing but good things to say about Neill as she posted stills of herself and Neill from Jurassic Park. “Sam — you were more than just a lovely actor to work with — refined, thoughtful, a skill second to none — you were a mentor, protector, and above all, friend,” she wrote on Instagram. “Thank you for making our scenes together feel so real. I will be forever grateful to have been on this journey with you. @samneilltheprop.”
Of course there’s nothing new about an older actor being nice to kids on set. It happens all the time. But what’s unique is that Grant’s entire role in Jurassic Park is to be saddled with babysitting these young kids against his will. And Neill was the exact opposite of that.
Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, who played Ellie Sattler and Ian Malcolm, described Neill in their own tributes using almost identical language to Richards. “Sam was my beloved lifetime friend… He showed me the depths of loyalty, protectiveness, and love, always with the driest of wit,” Dern wrote. So, no, his kindness wasn’t just reserved for child actors. It was just who Alan Grant’s actor happened to be.
Steven Spielberg, who directed him in three Jurassic Park films across three decades, said much the same in his own statement following Neill’s death. “Sam was exceptionally collaborative. It was a stretch for him to play a character who acted as though children were messy and smelly because this was the opposite of the loving father he was to his children.”
Watching Jurassic Park today, after his death and after these revelations, is quite different. Grant’s arc from reluctant guardian to devoted protector wasn’t just clever screenwriting. It was Sam Neill playing something close to the truth all along.
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