Sam Neill interview: Dean of movies

He would definitely not be spotted dick, but that's what Neill has chosen from the fashionably retro pudding menu. It arrives halfway through our interview and two slices bathed in custard gather a skin by the side of the table, ignored by Neill, until I cannot resist any longer. That's quite a small portion of dick, Sam, I say. Neill pretends to wince, but I suspect he's been waiting for a punchline since he put in his order.

Sam Neill may be one of New Zealand's best-known exports, but there's a touch of the languidly mischievous English gent about him. Off-camera, he's more ironic and less dour than his screen persona might suggest, and co-stars say he's given to prankishness. During the filming of Jurassic Park on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, it was Neill's idea to stage a mock fight among the actors in front of horrified Japanese tourists.

Meeting him in the flesh, you are struck by the timelessness of his looks (he is 61) – the wide forehead, straight nose and cheek-to-cheek smile. There may be a pair of reading glasses on the table but he's still one of cinema's hardest-working and most versatile actors. He can move between art film, exploitation flick and blockbuster: he dodged velociraptors for Spielberg, chopped off Holly Hunter's finger in The Piano, and he's always turning up in unexpected places. "I'm very little trouble on the set," he says. "As long as I have my own chair, I'm agreeable."

In the sort of double whammy that seems to come naturally to him, he has just flown in from South Africa after wrapping a mini-series of Robinson Crusoe for American TV in order to attend the premiere of Dean Spanley, a slice of British period dress whimsy with a deft screenplay by Scots novelist Alan Sharp. This time it's his quirky indie side that gets a workout, with Neill cast as the enigmatic Dean, who unravels after a couple of glasses of dessert wine to recount his past life as a dog. It's not a film that Neill has seen; he finds watching himself akin to Chinese water torture.

"I just see my mistakes," he says. It must have been some performance to make Hungary's sweet Imperial Tokay wine look delicious, especially since the film's budget replaced it with apple juice. "I hadn't had Tokay because Peter O'Toole has done his best to put me off – 'foreign muck, don't go near the stuff'."

You wonder how he manages to find time for life outside films, but far from Hollywood Neill takes another role seriously: not just as wine quaffer, but as vintner of his own New Zealand winery, Two Paddocks. He clearly enjoys discussing vintages and the heartbreaking destruction caused by a sudden sharp frost rather more than his acting techniques. "When you drink a glass of your own wine, if you have any kind of palate at all you can judge it with some kind of objectivity," he says. "That sort of objectivity is not available to you as an actor watching yourself."

No-one would argue that Neill is better known for his acting than his vintage red, but wine-making is an expensive habit and Two Paddocks's running costs are covered by the income generated by acting. "Hopefully, the wine will start paying me back, but it doesn't seem to want to at this point," Neill says. "We have an extremely approachable pinot noir. It's hard to find because I make some and I drink most of it." While he has no shortage of drinking companions, his wife is not one of them: "She's decided she doesn't like wine at all. She only drinks beer, but I can't afford a brewery."

Mrs Neill is make-up artist Noriko Watanabe, who won a Bafta for Memoirs of a Geisha. "We met on Dead Calm and I leapt out in pursuit of her. I met with tremendous resistance for a long time. I got there in the end with dogged persistence." They have a 16-year-old daughter, Elena, and Noriko has a daughter, Maiko, from a previous relationship. Neill has an adult son, Tim, from his relationship with actress Lisa Harrow. None has followed him into acting. "Intelligent children," he says, approvingly.

Neill was born in Northern Ireland but moved to New Zealand when he was eight, and started acting at university "for a bit of a laugh". But after an acclaimed Macbeth he joined a repertory company and toured New Zealand for a year. "It was best of all playing to Maori audiences who'd never seen a play. The freshness and excitement of their response staggered me."

He was also a film director, editor and scriptwriter for the New Zealand National Film Unit for six years, but as a twentysomething, with Australian thespian Judy Davis, he was thrust into the spotlight in 1979's My Brilliant Career. James Mason, who had seen Gillian Armstrong's film, became an early champion, sending Neill a ticket to London and encouraging him to find work there. "He got me to Europe," says Neill, who landed his first role in Britain in 1981 with Mason's help – playing Damien Thorn, the Antichrist, in The Final Conflict, the third Omen film.

"I played him as if he were the loneliest being on the face of the planet – after all, who would want to go to a bar and have a drink with the devil?" Hmmm, quite a few women, I would have thought. "Ah yes," he concedes. "I did get quite a lot of rather odd letters after Omen from women wanting to do unholy things with Damien."

During the 1980s Neill was mainly based in Britain, starring in the popular ITV series, Reilly: Ace of Spies. In films, he co-starred with Meryl Streep in Plenty and A Cry in the Dark. In 1986 he says he came within inches of landing the role of James Bond. For his screen test, like all candidates, he acted out a scene from From Russia With Love but while the director, John Glenn, was said to be keen to sign him up, Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, having been let down once before by an Antipodean actor – George Lazenby – knocked the idea back.

According to Neill: "My agent fancied it for me at the time but it wasn't something I wanted. Having said that, I'd love to play a villain in a Bond movie. That is one of my unfulfilled ambitions."

Neill is a bit like his 2006 pinot: he treats words like a good mouthful of red, something substantial to be savoured awhile. He's also a bit fruity. In the recent delirious ruffles and romp series The Tudors, for instance, he was great fun as the morally bendy Cardinal Wolsey, roughing up enemies and groping ladies of the court.

"I have one scene naked in bed with my mistress and at this time of my life I rather welcome that, actually," he says disarmingly. "Mostly if I get asked to do bedroom scenes these days they involve pyjamas, a book and some reading glasses and I'm the one who turns the light off."

Dean Spanley is in cinemas from 12 December.

Sam Neill on …

THE SON of a New Zealand army officer father (Harrow and Sandhurst) and an English mother, Nigel Neill was packed off to "a very English" boarding school when he was seven. There, the other boys renamed him Sam. "Odd kind of place, not a place you'd find too many Nigels."

"James Mason sort of took me under his wing. I thought he was a wonderful actor, and I admired the way he moved in the world. So I suppose if I've had a model, it would be James."

Steven Spielberg directed him in Jurassic Park: "He cared about character more than many directors would. Yet he's very fast and thinks six times more quickly than I do. He did 60 per cent of the camera operating in Jurassic Park. I'd never seen a director actually operating the camera."

"I'm used to playing parts where the actresses get the gong when the film's released and I don't. But actually I like working with women more than men. More interesting things take place between men and women than between men and men. What could be more boring than a pub or a locker room?"