Jurassic Parkstar Sam Neill has come to terms with his stage three blood cancer diagnosis, though it doesn't make the possibility of dying any less "annoying."
During a recent interview on ABC's Australian Story, the 76-year-old candidly opened up about his health woes — specifically surrounding a miracle drug doctors warned will one day stop working.
"I know I've got it, but I'm not really interested in it," Neill explained during the television series, noting, "it's out of my control. If you can't control it, don't get into it."
The Peaky Blinders actor received his diagnosis early last year during his first visit back to New Zealand to see his family after two years of lockdowns and restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Neill had been back home for just barely one hour when he received a dreadful phone call from his doctor informing him he had cancer, his son, Tim, explained during the episode.
"When he hung the phone up and we sat down, and we had a little bit of a cry together. It was supposed to be a happy day. He didn't get to stay," Tim, 40, continued of his dad, who had to cut his trip short in order to start treatment.
"I was in really a fight for my life. And everything was a new world and a rather alarming world," Sam recalled of the difficult time. "I had three or four months of reasonably conventional chemotherapies which are, brutal."
The chemotherapy made Sam extremely weak, which took Tim by surprise when he eventually went to see his father.
"I was shocked, and I broke down and I could barely hug him. He was just, you know, bones and skin. And then he was giving me a hard time for being upset about it and saying I was stressing him out, but I was going, 'What are you talking about, Dad?'" Tim detailed.
After three months of chemotherapy, Sam and his family received heartbreaking news — the treatment was no longer working, causing the cancer to come back at an even worse level than before.
Miraculously, his doctors decided to switch to a rare anti-cancer drug to stop the growing tumor, and it worked.
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Sam has now been in remission for 12 months and receives infusions every two weeks for the foreseeable future, however, his doctors warned him that the drug won't work forever.
He described the few days after each treatment as "very grim and depressing," and despite feeling like he fought a boxer for 10 rounds, "it's keeping me alive."
Sam first revealed his diagnosis in his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This, published back in March, informing readers he was "possibly dying."
"I didn't know really how long I had to live," he explained during Australian Story. "And I thought, yeah, I should probably write something down for my children, my grandchildren, because I may not be here in a couple of months and it would be good for them to have a sense of me, you know, and and some of the things that I've done."
Regarding the treatment not working forever, Sam assured: "I'm prepared for that."
"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," he confessed.
