As cancer treatment's effectiveness wanes, Sam Neill doesn't fear death

Earlier this year, beloved actor and farm animal whisperer Sam Neill revealed he was undergoing treatment for stage-three blood cancer. He’s been in remission for a year, but the good news is far from a clean bill of health. Following three months of unsuccessful chemotherapy, his doctors put him on experimental treatment, a rare cancer drug that requires infusions every two weeks. This isn’t a long-term solution, though. On top of the treatment’s recovery period, its effectiveness will cease at some point, meaning doctors will have to find another alternative. Nevertheless, in a new interview with Australian Story, Neill admits that dying would be “annoying,” and he’s “not remotely afraid” of it. However, retirement “fills me with horror.”

As much as Neill loves spending time with other performers and continuing to work, the Possession actor’s non-Hodgkin blood cancer, angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, isn’t going away. His doctors say when his treatment stops working, they “may need to think about a third-line option.”

“That’s a difficult thing to carry around, day in, day out, waiting for that to happen,” says his hematologist Dr. Orly Lavee.

Neill divulged his cancer diagnosis via his 2023 memoir Did I Ever Tell You This, a project he started writing to avoid thinking about his treatment. And Neill’s cancer treatment sounds particularly brutal. The indefinite infusions beget a “very grim and depressing” recovery period of about four days, leaving Neill with 10 days “in which I could not feel more alive or pleased to be breathing and looking at a blue sky” before returning for more treatment.

“I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me,” Neill told The Guardian in March. “Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses. I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big. But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.”