‘Jurassic Park’ actor Sam Neill says he’s ‘prepared to die from his cancer, but the thought of retiring ‘fills me with horror’

Since the 1980s, actor Sam Neill has been well known to the general public, thanks to films such as The Hunt for Red October, The Piano, Thor and especially the mid-1990s Jurassic Park movies. His passion for his craft has made him a respected name in the industry, and he has 150 titles under his belt. At 76, he has no intention of slowing down, despite the fact that he is facing a rare late-stage blood cancer. Now, in an interview, he says that he is prepared to die, but not to retire.

Neill disclosed his diagnosis in March in his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, which became a bestseller in Australia and New Zealand. In his book, Neill explained that a year before he had been diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare cancer that affected his blood and was quite advanced. “The thing is, I’m done. Possibly dying,” he wrote at the time. But, happily, his self-assessment was not entirely accurate. The actor gave an interview to Australian Story from his New Zealand ranch in which he explained that he tries to forget about his illness whenever he can. “I know I’ve got it, but I’m not really interested in it,” he says of his cancer. “It’s out of my control. If you can’t control it, don’t get into it,” he adds, explaining that he leaves everything to his doctors and tries to think about it as little as possible. But he acknowledges that the disease obviously occupies much of his thoughts. Still, he’s “grateful to wake up” every morning, he says.

During the interview, the British-born actor explains that when he was diagnosed with cancer, his doctors tried to treat him with chemotherapy for three months, but it stopped working and the tumor continued to grow, so they decided to switch to an experimental treatment. It seems that they got it right, and he has been in remission for the past year. But that is not permanent. The doctors have explained to him that, at a certain point, still to be determined, the medication will stop working. His hematologists are looking for a third approach to a cure. One of his doctors observes that waiting for the experimental treatment to stop working is “a difficult thing to carry around, day in, day out, waiting for that to happen.”

Hence, he assumes his fate. “I’m prepared for that,” the actor says calmly. He’s living happily among his animals, his Pinot Noir vineyards and his children and grandchildren on his farm in Otago’s Gibbston Valley. He is divorced from New Zealand actress, environmental activist and author Lisa Harrow, to whom he was married between 1978 and 1989; they share a son, Tim. Neill was also married to actress Noriko Watanabe, whom he met while filming Dead Calm in 1989 and with whom he has a daughter, Elena; the couple separated in 2015. He doesn’t have a partner now and admits that he sometimes finds it hard to deal with loneliness. “I had some very lonely times last year,” he says. And, although he has been on a few dates, he doesn’t want to look too far ahead: “I’m in a very uncertain world at the moment. Very uncertain. Nothing is assured.”

But Neill is not anxious about death; he accepted it after learning of the diagnosis. Yes, he finds it “annoying,” because he has many things left to do, but he says he is not “remotely afraid” of dying. However, he doesn’t want to retire. He says that “it fills me with horror.” In 2022, Neill released The Twelve, a 10-episode TV miniseries in 2022 (which he also produced), adapted from the Belgian show of the same name, and this year, he’s already been involved in three films. He has a series and a movie coming out and is also directing and will co-star in another, Apples Never Fall, based on the book by best-selling author Liane Moriarty.

Every two weeks, Neill has to go to the hospital for transfusions. For now, he is continuing with his treatment indefinitely. The after-effects are “very grim and depressing,” he says. But after that, he spends another 10 days during which he “could not feel more alive or pleased to be breathing and looking at a blue sky” He has also recovered his appearance; after the first months of chemotherapy he was bald. “I wasn’t a pretty sight: I had no hair, no beard,” he says; over the past few months, he has been recovering and can now work, either as an actor or in his vineyards, which he couldn’t do when he was undergoing chemotherapy. “I started to look at my life and realise how immensely grateful I am for so much of it,” he notes. “I started to think I better write some of this down because I’m not sure how long I have to live. I was running against the clock.” In addition, writing, as something he could do at the time, gave him purpose, and put his life and mind in order. When his book reached 50,000 words, Neill decided to publish it. That way, he was leaving something for his children and grandchildren: “I thought it would be great for them to have some of my stories,” he says. “I mightn’t be here in a month or two. We’ll leave something for them.”

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