Sam Neill, Who Is Battling Cancer, Fears Retirement More Than Death
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Sam Neill, who’s faced cloned dinosaurs and the literal antichrist in his movies, is not merely afraid of dying from blood cancer as he is of retirement in real life.
In a new interview with Australian Story, the celebrated actor spoke about his battle with non-Hodgkin blood cancer, which he was diagnosed with last year. Neill is currently in remission thanks to a drug he started taking after his chemotherapy treatments stopped working. But despite the success, Neill’s doctors have warned him the drug will stop working at some point.
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“I’m prepared for that,” Neil said, adding that he chooses not to spend too much time thinking about the disease. “I know I’ve got it, but I’m not really interested in it. It’s out of my control. If you can’t control it, don’t get into.”
Neill was similarly composed when discussing death, saying he’s “not remotely afraid” of it. Instead, he called death “annoying” and insisted that the great unknowable abyss of life’s end doesn’t conjure any fear in him — it’s retirement that “fills me with horror.”
It’s no surprise then that Neill was working on two projects before the writers and actors strikes forced productions to close down. One project was a movie with Anette Bening, an adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel, Apples Never Fall, while the other was season two of the mini-series The Twelve.
Earlier this year, Neill published a memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, in which he publicly revealed his cancer diagnosis.
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