Sam Neill is the daily motivation we badly need during social distancing

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread and the news continues to be largely terrible, it’s more important than ever that we balance out our media consumption.

And what’s the best counter to a constant barrage of worrying statistics?

The answer, it turns out, has been under our noses the whole time: Sam Neill’s Twitter feed.

The Jurassic Park legend’s social media has long been a glorious place, but in recent weeks — while he’s been social distancing on his own — Neill has really stepped up his game.

From Radiohead ukulele covers to footwear updates, here’s what he’s been posting…

This shoe-washing pick-me-up.

“Like a lot of the world, I’m kind of in self-isolation at the moment,” says Neill in the clip above. “So what to do?”

The answer, it turns out, is laundering all of his sneakers.

“I didn’t realise I had so many shoes that are pretty much exactly the same,” he concludes. “But boy, do they smell good.”

A bit of poetry reading.

“There’s no one around to annoy, so what the hell!” says Neill, before launching into a reading of a poem called No Doctors Today, Thank You by Ogden Nash.

The cheery chuckle at the end is what makes it.

Strumming the ukulele.

For someone who “hasn’t really picked up a uke for years,” Neill is pretty darn good, we’d say.

A lesson in coffee.

“Today, I want to learn about something that’s been a mystery to me for a very long time,” says Neill, cracking open a copy of Sandra Rendgen’s Understanding the World. “What exactly is the difference between a café latte, a cappuccino, a flat white, and a macchiato?”

Now is as good a time to find out as any.

This exclusive look at Neill’s dinner.

The slow zoom says it all.

A bit more poetry.

This time we get two poems about love, read in Neill’s trademark, dulcet tones.

This lesson on wine.

The video above is well worth watching to the end, purely for the skit where Neill “accidentally” pours four glasses of wine instead of one.

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” says Neill, staring at the camera. “There’s no-one else here. I think I made a terrible mistake.

“Oh. wait a minute! I’ve got a really good idea: What I’m going to do, is I think I’ll Skype about half a dozen good mates, we’ll all open a bottle of wine, and we’ll have good conversation and chats, and the party can go on for quite a while!”

Playing some more ukulele.

Neill’s first ukulele cover album is surely just one more viral tweet away, right?

Reading children’s poems.

Is there anything more wholesome than Sam Neill reading poetry from A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, a book he loved as a kid?

We think not.

This cover of a Radiohead classic.

“I love Radiohead so much,” says Neill, after finishing a cover of “Creep”. “And I love that song. It’s for all the people like me that weren’t in the first 15, and we weren’t in the cheerleader squad. We just wanted to be special.”

Like many of his Twitter videos at the moment, Neill finishes by pivoting back to talking about the coronavirus.

“Look, I know so many of us are afraid and anxious at the moment,” says Neill. “But don’t be afraid. Don’t be anxious. We’ll get through this thing. We might be a bit tattered and torn at the end of it, but we’ll get through.” 

Doing an impression of a kookaburra.

It’s that level of commitment that’s made Neill the actor he is today.

And finally, a bit more poetry.

However long this pandemic lasts, it’s nice to know we’ll have Sam Neill — complete with his readings, and his wine, and his ukulele — for company.