According to Sam Neill, dinosaurs weren’t the only danger threatening the cast and crew on the set of Jurassic Park. After recently starring in an Xfinity Super Bowl ad that reimagines Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with the preview tour going off without a hitch, Neill is sharing stories about the time a hurricane sent everyone on the film’s set into a panic. Still, despite the danger, Neill says it led to an incredible bonding experience for all involved.
Hurricane Iniki, uh, finds a way
“We’d been working in Hawaii for a week or 10 days, and we went down to report for duty at 6:30 in the morning or whatever it is,” Neill, who played paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece, recalls. “And they said, ‘We’re not going to work today…There’s a hurricane coming.”
Neill thinks back, “it all went very still,” noting how “the tide went out a bit.”
“Laura and I went down to the beach, and she said, ‘Do you think we might die today?’ And I said, ‘I think that’s entirely possible,’” Neill replied.
The Jurassic cast and crew take shelter
To combat the storm, Neill says the cast took shelter in the resort’s ballroom. “Because it traveled very fast, it wasn’t a very damaging hurricane, but it did a lot of damage when it was right over the top of us,” Neill remembers. “It destroyed our sets, and it meant we had to travel back to L.A. in two or three days when a plane could actually land — ’cause the airport was covered in dead trees and things.”
With no choice but to wait for the storm to pass and for crew members to clear and repair the sets, Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Spielberg, “had nothing to do except entertain each other.”
“I’ve been through a few semi-disasters on films, but that’s the closest we actually came to death,” Neill says about avoiding the brunt of Hurricane Iniki‘s wrath.
Memories of Hurricane Floyd
Having grown up on the Long Island Sound. Literally living in three houses located on the beach throughout the years, I’ve encountered my fair share of hurricanes. Hurricane Floyd was nasty. The winds were so strong that Mother Nature ripped shrubbery from the ground in my backyard and threw it against the side of the house. The cleanup after the storm took weeks, with trees blocking roads, electrical wires dangling from poles, and windows boarded up from where debris smashed through. As bad as Floyd was, I can’t imagine what Hurricane Iniki was like for the Jurassic Park cast and crew. What’s the worst hurricane you’ve experienced? Let us know in the comments section below.
