Sam Neill reveals his secret battle with stage 3 blood cancer in his upcoming memoir “Did I Ever Tell You This?”
The 75-year-old “Jurassic Park” star recalled experiencing swollen glands a yr ago while doing press for “Jurassic World Dominion.”
He said he was soon diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, undergoing chemotherapy until he switched to a recent drug he expects to take every month for the remaining of his life.
“The thing is, I’m crook. Possibly dying,” he writes in the primary chapter of his book, which comes out Tuesday. “I could have to hurry this up.”
He said he never intended to jot down a memoir, but began doing so during treatment last yr, as he realized it “was actually type of giving me a reason to live.”
“I discovered myself with … nothing to do,” Neill explained to the Guardian in an interview published Friday.
“And I’m used to working. I really like working. I really like going to work. I really like being with people every single day and having fun with human company and friendship and all this stuff. And suddenly I used to be deprived of that. And I believed, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Neill says he’s now cancer-free, though he does depend on the monthly chemotherapy drug.
“I can’t pretend that the last yr hasn’t had its dark moments,” he admitted. “But those dark moments throw the sunshine into sharp relief, you recognize, and have made me grateful for every single day and immensely grateful for all my friends. Just pleased to be alive.”
The actor rose to international fame in 1993 together with his role as Dr. Alan Grant in “Jurassic Park.” He played the identical character in “Jurassic Park III” (2001) and “Jurassic World Dominion” (2022).
His most up-to-date acting credit is “Assassin Club,” due out next month. He’s slated to seem in several upcoming projects, in response to his IMDb page.
