Beloved Jurassic Park star Sam Neill has shared that he is officially cancer free after a five-year battle with stage-three blood cancer.
“I’ve just had a scan just now and there is no cancer in my body, that’s an extraordinary thing,” he told 7 News, noting that he’s keen to do another movie now that he’s cancer free.
“I’m very, very excited that this can happen.”
The 78-year-old — who has been very open about his diagnosis and treatment since 2023 — credits his remission to a new, highly personalised treatment called Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell [CAR T-cell] therapy. The treatment is a form of specialised immunotherapy which re-engineers a patients own immune cells to kill cancer cells.
“I’ve been living with a particular type of lymphoma for about five years and I was on chemotherapy and the pretty miserable business but it was keeping me alive,” he continued.
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“Then the chemo stopped working. I was at a loss and it looked like I was on the way out, which wasn’t ideal obviously.”
The treatment, which can only be acquired privately, reportedly costs around $540,000 AUD. It is also in clinical trials to help treat myeloma, another blood cancer. Now, Neill is advocating for the treatment to become available to anyone who needs it.
“Treatments like this — CAR-T therapies and others coming through in a rapidly changing medical world — I hope to be available to everyone who needs them in Australia & NZ (and worldwide),” Neill wrote in a post on Instagram.
“This is what I am advocating , along with The Snowdome Foundation, to push for exactly that.
Back in July 2024, Neill shared a heart breaking update with fans about his ongoing cancer battle, telling the Herald Sun that his treatment has had a big impact on the way he’s able to live his life.
Despite the devastating news, Sam said he continued to remain optimistic.
“It’s just meant that every second week it was a case of forget about the weekend because that would be a bit grim,” he explained of his treatment schedule. “But other than that, it’s great to be alive and working and in beautiful places, like York.”
In 2023, Sam insisted that although he wasn’t afraid of dying after battling cancer, he “would be annoyed” because he still has many things he wants to achieve, both in his career and his personal life.
The actor won the 2023 Silver Logie for Most Popular Actor for his performance in The Twelve.
(Credit: Instagram)In October 2023 the New Zealand Native confirmed on Australian Story that his chemotherapy treatment had failed, however he also revealed he was now on an anti-cancer drug and had positively been in remission for more than 12 months.
Sadly, however, the drug will eventually stop working.
“I didn’t know, really, how long I had to live. Once it [chemotherapy] started to fail I thought, what happens now?” he shared candidly on the program.
His Haematologist Dr. Orly Lavee shed further light on the 76-year-old’s diagnosis of the rare blood cancer – angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma – which Sam first made public via his memoir in March 2023.
“The tumour started to outsmart the drugs before we even got through the first regiment,” Dr. Lavee shared.
After chemotherapy failed, Sam chose to explore more “novel agents”, including his miracle anti-cancer drug which Dr. Lavee said he responded to “brilliantly” and “very quickly.”
“To everybody’s surprise, it started to work,” Dr.Lavee said.
He has been a part of the Jurassic franchise as Dr Alan Grant from 1993 to 2022, starring in their latest movie Jurassic World Dominion.
(Credit: Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment)In the year that has followed, Sam has been in remission from his blood cancer, confirming that he will now rely on this drug for the rest of his life, however long that may be.
“It’s keep me alive, and being alive is infinitely preferable to the alternative. But I’ve also got to be realistic. One doctor said to me, ‘This stuff will stop working one day too’, so I’m prepared for that.”
“I’m not in any way frightened of dying, but I would be annoyed because there are things I want to do,” he added.
The morning after his Australian Story interview aired, the actor reiterated that he was “firmly in remission” and planned to remain so for many years to come, revealing that even when his drug did stop working he would explore further treatment.
“The cancer landscape is very different these days; at such a time that this treatment might fail, we will try something else,” he penned to his Instagram.
Sam Neill released his memoir in March 2023.
(Credit: Instagram)Whilst the news is devastating, Sam has divulged that he’s “not particularly interested” in his cancer and has “other things” on his mind, including adding to his already expansive acting portfolio.
“I’m doing my first, sort of, substantial work for a year. The idea of retirement fills me with horror, actually, to not be able to do the things that you love would be heartbreaking.”
Sam has recently appeared in the television adaption of Liane Moriarty’s bestselling novel Apples Never Fall, as well as season two of Logie Award-winning mini-series The Twelve.
“I’m not particuarly interested in cancer, I know I’ve got it, [but] I’ve got other things on my mind and it’s not cancer,” he said.
This isn’t the first time Sam has shared these sentiments when it comes to his stage three cancer diagnosis, telling the BBC in early 2023 that he wasn’t “really interested in anything other than living.”
According to the BBC, the actor only decided to write his memoir after being given the bad news by his doctor.
It is believed that Sam discovered a lump on his body, an indicator that he was suffering from the uncommon blood cancer, during a publicity tour for Jurassic World: Dominion in 2022.
“I thought I need to do something, and I thought, ‘Shall I start writing?’ I didn’t think I had a book in me, I just thought I’d write some stories. And I found it increasingly engrossing,” he said at the time, joking that his publishers were quick to get his memoir out on shelves “just in case I kicked the bucket before it was time to release the thing.”
Order your copy of ‘Did I Ever Tell You This?’ by Sam Neill here.
