‘The Piano’ Is a Sam Neill Thirst Trap and I Am Here for It

In case you couldn’t tell by the headline and accompanying pic, I love Sam Neill. In my pantheon of celebrity crushes, he sits in the throne like the Zeus of New Zealand. This crush goes way back, too, because Neill was my first-ever celebrity crush. I knew Sam Neill was handsome before I even knew I was gay! Any time I get the chance to write about the impossibly increasing hotness of Sam Neill, I take it.  So when I saw that Hulu was adding The Piano to its lineup on March 1, I knew what I had to do.

While I hadn’t seen The Piano when I pitched this piece, I knew three things: Anna Paquin won an Oscar for it; there’s a piano; and Sam Neill has incredible sideburns. After I pitched it, I learned a fourth and fifth thing: Sam Neill (unsurprisingly) plays the bad guy, and Harvey Keitel hangs dong. Watching this movie at work was gonna be wild, but totally worth it to see Sam Neill in period garb rocking muttonchops! Just for fun, here’s the synopsis I wrote for The Piano knowing only those five things before I fired it up on Hulu:

In this sweeping period piece romance, Laura Linney plays a woman torn between the man she loves (Harvey Keitel) and the man she’s married to (Sam Neill). Caught in this heartbreaking pull is her daughter (Anna Paquin), a girl whose only escape comes via… the piano.

Listen, I am not the first person to confuse Laura Linney and Holly Hunter. I’ll even bet that more than half of you read that synopsis and didn’t even clock that I mixed up these character actresses! After watching all two hours of this steamy and damp drama (just so much moisture), I now know that I was kinda right but also very wrong. Holly Hunter is mute and, as I took it, the piano is a stand-in for her voice. She gets sold, along with her feisty daughter, to a frontiersman in New Zealand played by Neill. Harvey Keitel is Neill’s buddy and, viewed through 2019 eyes, basically just as sketchy as Neill!

Without getting into it because this is supposed to be a light and hyperbolically superficial piece, a lot of bad things happen to Hunter’s Ada McGrath in this movie. Alisdair Stewart (Neill) comes off way worse than Baines (Keitel), but only in the last third of the film! There’s just… a lot. This is why I’m not going to say the name “Alisdair Stewart” again, because dude is definitely problematic AF. I’m not talking about his hotness. I’m talking about Sam Neill’s hotness–and this is definitely a clarification you have to make when watching almost any Sam Neill movie that isn’t Jurassic Park. He’s hot as a deranged mad scientist (Event Horizon), he’s hot as a bloodsucking vampire daddy (Daybreakers), he even hot as the literal Antichrist (Omen III). He’s also hot in The Piano.

Very hot. This is some peak Sam Neill right here, fresh off of playing Dr. Alan Grant but still very much a fan of the denim ‘n’ neckerchief combo.

And then there are those sideburns. I legit had no idea that I was playing Sam Neill Facial Hair Bingo until I saw him in The Piano and realized that while I’ve seen him with a glorious mustache (The Jungle Book) and a bushy beard (Hunt for the Wilderpeople), I’ve never seen him rock the kind of sideburns usually reserved for hunky indie folk/rock hotties.

I mean, just look at him. Sam Neill’s look in The Piano is essentially Dr. Alan Grant joins the Decemberists and it is exactly what I ordered–but off the secret menu, because I had no idea this was ever an option.

That’s not the only look Neill turns in this movie, far from it! There are also all of his formal looks, which look like if Paul F. Tompkins played stylist for Abraham Lincoln, as modeled by a sweaty Sam Neill.

Did I intentionally edit those pictures together so it would look like Dapper Sam Neill is checking out Even Dapper-er Sam Neill? No, some things in life are just handsome coincidences.

Believe it or not, the looks don’t stop there! I haven’t even gotten to Neill’s New Zealand cowboy outfit, complete with a hat that looks more like the saddest church lady hat in history–but Sam somehow makes it werk.

I’d be remiss if I wrote what I assume is the first and potentially only ever Piano thirst-trap post and didn’t point out that Keitel isn’t the only one that bares all in this movie. Being a nude scene cynic, I’m convinced that you can only be certain the butt belongs to the man if you see the butt and the face in the same shot. That’s not the case in The Piano, as Holly Hunter caresses a butt that could belong to anyone. The Piano does, however, go here…

That is way more of Sam Neill than I saw in In the Mouth of Madness, Bicentennial Man, or his five minutes in The Commuter. I was warned about Harvey Keitel’s Tommy Wiseau-esque bod, but no one prepared me for Sam Neill side-butt! Also no one prepared me for how, uh, weirdly uncomfortable this whole scene was–especially everything that happens afterwards. Anyway…

Is The Piano Neill’s hottest movie ever? It’s hard to beat my undying affection for Alan Grant, but woo boy this movie comes very close–and also because as a TV docuseries, Pacific: In the Wake of Captain Cook is ineligible for this particular superlative. While Alisdair Stewart is definitely hot garbage, Sam Neill is definitely hot.

Stream The Piano on Hulu