#i love that the whole interview is sam contradicting whatever leigh keily says

[mundaneandmagicalcreature]

I transcribed it cuz the typography is tiny

Leigh Keily: Where are you from?

Sam Reid: I’m from south of Sydney, I grew up on a cattle farm an hour south of Canberra Near the Australian ski fields, which actually exist, which most people don’t know. But I went to school in Sydney which is usually an easier answer!

Stephen Conway: Were you a farmer?

Sam: In school holidays I was, yeah…

Stephen: We had a farm issue…

Sam: Did you?

Leigh: Yeah…

Sam: Oh issue as in a magazine issue… I thought you meant you had like an ‘issue’ (raises eyebrow).

Leigh: Yeah… Most magazines don’t have farm issues. It was actually in my editor’s letter last month that we had to do the Outward Bound survival camp.

Sam: I was an Outward Bound instructor! Did you enjoy it.

Leigh: Only in retrospect. It was horrible at the time.

Sam: Very good life experience I think. Good for character building.

Leigh: It was really good to see people crack under the pressure, of course.

Sam: It was always the guys that cracked! I loved it, having to get massive spiders out of the tents and teaching people how to make tents out of plastic and bits of rope. I always think I’m the worst advertiser for Australia because I always bring up the spiders…

Leigh: I once went to get to bed and there was a snake in my bed.

Sam: Really? My mom once put her foot in a shoe and there was a funnel-web spider in it, and they’re the spiders that are so deadly you have like twenty minutes to get to a hospital if you’re bitten, or you die. And that was living at home in Sydney.

Leigh: Yeah, that’s kind of scary.

Sam: It’s cool though.

Leigh: It’s kind of cool coming from a country where you know spiders are deadly. English people get so freaked out by the smallest creatures here.

Sam: Well it’s kind of like a playground here where you can run around in the grass bare foot and not even worry about it.

Leigh and Stephen gesture arms flapping, running through a field.

Leigh: So what have you been doing lately?

Sam: Well, I’ve had a few films out this year so I’ve had kind of a mad year flying all over the place promoting these films. The Railway Man came out this year and Belle, which we had this incredible journey around America. We opened the film in America and Oprah Winfrey liked the movie and invited me, Gugu and the director to her house. She threw this big lunch - it was nuts! I remember driving up to her house and being like “holy fuck this is actually happening” and there was Oprah standing at the door in her orange poncho. I mean it was incredible having someone

Never getting over the fact that our favourite farmboy Samanthyne Reid also used to be a survival instructor who liked to build tents out of scraps and go hunting for cool spiders in the Australian outback.

From JON Magazine issue 6.