Sam Neill Assures ‘All Is Well’ in New Video Amid Cancer Battle
UPDATE (10/17/2023): Sam Neill has taken to Instagram to assure fans that he’s doing well and that his comments about his cancer battle in an interview with Australian Story have caused unnecessary alarm.
“ALL IS WELL. I AM WELL!!” Neill wrote in the caption of an Instagram video shared on October 17. “Please ignore conflated stories in the press today. A passing remark on the program last night has been taken out of context. Please be assured that I am firmly in remission, and plan to remain so for years to come. All is well, beautiful day here in Western Australia, and tomorrow it’ll be too.”
“I made a passing remark [in the Australian Story interview] that the treatment I’m on, which has me in remission, will inevitably fail one day. Well, that’s what happens. It’s nothing to worry about,” Neill says in the video. “I am in remission. I plan to be in remission for many years to come. I will bore you all to death with lots more work. And at such time as it does fail, we’ll try something else. There’s all sorts of things that are happening with cancer [treatments] these days. It’s a whole new ball game. So, please stop worrying.”
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ORIGINAL STORY (10/16/2023): Jurassic Park star Sam Neill has revealed that the treatment for his stage 3 blood cancer diagnosis is likely to stop working.
The 76-year-old actor revealed in his March 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, that he had been previously diagnosed with a rare blood cancer called angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. After his first go at chemotherapy didn’t work, he began a new, “very expensive” and experimental drug that helped him go into remission. He said at the time that he’d have to be on the medication for the rest of his life.
In an interview with Australian Story, Neill revealed that his doctors upped his dosage for the “grim and depressing” drug from once monthly to every two weeks. He has now been in remission for 12 months, but his doctors have said the medication will likely stop working.
“I’m prepared for that,” Neill told the outlet, noting in a corresponding video interview that he’s “not in any way frightened of dying. It’s never worried me from the beginning. But I would be annoyed, because there are things I still want to do.” “Very irritating, dying,” he added with a chuckle, “but I’m not afraid of it.”
Neill told Australian Story that the days after receiving the medication, which requires transfusions every two weeks, are “very grim and depressing,” describing it as going “10 rounds with a boxer. … But it’s keeping me alive.” Retiring from acting, however, “fills me with horror,” the Peaky Blinders star said.
Before the writers and actors’ strikes, Neill was filming the TV adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall with Annette Bening. He was also working on Season 2 of the Australian miniseries The Twelve. He had to take a break from acting in 2022 when receiving chemotherapy treatments, which were hard on his body. That downtime was spent tending to his Central Otago, New Zealand vineyard and writing his memoir.
