Sam Neill has spoken up about his experience coping with stage three blood cancer after disclosing that his treatment did not work.
Despite this, the 76-year-old Jurassic Park star has stated that he is ‘not terrified’ of death.
He is also receiving an experimental new medicine after being diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, which has kept him in remission for the past year.
Despite his’very gloomy and sad’ therapy every two weeks indefinitely, physicians have informed him that the medicine would ultimately cease working.
The New Zealand actor, who revealed his cancer diagnosis earlier this spring while promoting his novel Did I Ever Tell You This?, was diagnosed in March 2022 after having swollen glands while promoting Jurassic World Dominion.
Neill told ABC’s Australian Story: ‘I’m not in any way frightened of dying. That doesn’t worry me. It’s never worried me from the beginning, but I would be annoyed.
‘I’d be annoyed because there are things I still want to do. Very irritating, dying. But I’m not afraid of it.’
Neill also released photographs and video from his failed treatment last year, when he lost his hair and seemed emaciated, with his son, Tim Neill-Harrow, characterising him as “bones and skin.”
He is ‘prepared’ for the day when doctors inform him his rare anti-cancer medicine infusions are no longer feasible, but he is determined to continue his profession.
After all, he acknowledges that the prospect of retiring “fills me with horror.”
The Peaky Blinders actor and winemaker also stated that he is ‘not particularly interested in’ his disease and would rather spend his time doing other, more important things than combing the internet for assistance and information on his health.
‘It’s out of my control. If you can’t control it, don’t get into it,’ Neill argued.
Before the Sag-Aftra strike began in June, the actor was collaborating with Annette Bening on the film version of Lianne Moriarty’s novel Apples Never Fall.
He is currently filming season two of the miniseries The Twelve, which is about a murder jury.
The decision to write his book, which he previously said he raced to finish because he didn’t know how much longer he had to live, sprang from his wish to leave his four children and eight grandchildren with a “sense of me.”
‘I thought it would be great for them to have some of my stories. I mightn’t be here in a month or two. We’ll leave something for them.’
Neill, who is single after divorcing from his second wife Noriko Watanabe in 2017, has gone on a few dates but is sensitive with how he handles looking too far forward in his ‘uncertain environment’ where ‘nothing is secure’.
