Sam Neill reunited with Scarlett Johansson in Jurassic World Rebirth. While Neill is one of the leads from Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park films, Johansson joined the franchise in Jurassic World 4. The 78-year-old recently admitted that the film felt like “a family affair.”
Sam Neill says he feels like Scarlett Johansson is his daughter
Back in 1998, Sam Neill and Scarlett Johansson played the father-daughter duo, Robert and Grace MacLean, in The Horse Whisperer. The Marvel star was 12 years old at the time. In the film, Grace and her horse suffered serious injuries after they got into a devastating accident. Her father hired a talented horse trainer to help the family get through the recovery.
Reflecting on his reunion with Johansson in Jurassic World Rebirth during a recent conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Neill said, “I’m very fond of Scarlett. I feel like it’s a family affair here. We were with Kristin Scott Thomas and Robert Redford, and we were out in Montana, and I was playing her dad. So I feel like my daughter, she’s capable of kicking any ass. She gets it from me.”
In the 2025 film, the Lost in Translation star appeared as Zora Bennett, a special ops expert. A pharmaceutical company hired Bennett to go to an island research facility with a team aiming to extract DNA samples from three different species of dinosaurs. Besides Neill and Johansson, it also starred Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. The movie was a major commercial success, earning an impressive $869.1 million at the global box office.
Neill, Dern, and Goldblum are reprising their respective roles as palaeontologist Alan Grant, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, and mathematician Ian Malcolmfor for Xfinity’s Super Bowl commercial. Taika Waititi, who directed Neill’s The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, is helming the ad. It reimagines the plot of Jurassic Park and shows how the park system never fails, thanks to Xfinity’s reliable wifi connection. Consequently, the dinosaurs don’t break out of their pens and attack people.
