'Looked like I was on the way out': Sam Neill reveals he came close to death as he gives huge cancer update

Sam Neill has revealed he came close to death during his long battle with a type of lymphoma but is now cancer-free after undergoing groundbreaking new treatment.

The 78-year-old Jurassic Park star revealed during an interview with 7News that he had been having chemotherapy for about five years to keep him alive before it "stopped working".

"I was at a loss and it looked like I was on the way out, which wasn't ideal obviously," he said, before revealing he was offered a lifeline in the form of CAR T-cell therapy.

"I've just had a scan just now and there is no cancer in my body, that's an extraordinary thing. I'm very, very excited that this can happen," he said.

According to the Leukaemia Foundation, CAR T-cell therapy is a type of immunotherapy that sees CAR T-cells collected from a patient before being sent to a lab where genetic information is added to them that are tailored to recognise cancer.

They are then multiplied and infused back into the body where they recognise, attack and kill cancer cells.

CAR T-cell therapy is currently only approved in Australia for four types of blood cancers following a relapse.

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Neill is now helping raise awareness of the treatment that saved his life in the hope more Australians will have access to it.

Neill was diagnosed with stage 3 angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in 2022, after experiencing swollen glands while doing publicity for Jurassic World: Dominion.

He only revealed he had been privately battling the disease a year later when he released his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?

At the time, he said he was treated with chemotherapy, which eventually started to fail, and had been moved on to a new drug that he would remain on for the rest of his life.

But now it appears that drug also failed, making it necessary for him to undergo CAR T-cell therapy.

According to the Leukaemia Foundation, CAR T-cell therapy is a "complicated and long" form of treatment that also requires a large dose of chemotherapy prior to receiving the harvested cells.

O'Neill said he started writing his memoir after his cancer diagnosis after finding he had nothing to do during treatment.

"The thing is, I'm crook. Possibly dying," he wrote in chapter one. "I may have to speed this up."

"As I went on and kept writing, I realised it was actually sort of giving me a reason to live and I would go to bed thinking, 'I'll write about that tomorrow… that will entertain me.'

"And so it was a lifesaver really, because I couldn't have gone through that with nothing to do."

He spoke about the brutal side effects of his cancer treatment during an August 2024 episode of the ABC series The Assembly.

"I'm on a different [drug] now, so at least I don't look like somebody's bald thumb," Neill said.

"That's what I looked like for quite a while – it was embarrassing, and I lost my beard and everything, and my dignity went with it."

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He told Nine's Today show a month earlier he was "feeling absolutely great" and looking forward to taking on more acting projects.

"The thing about cancers, there's so many different types of them, you know and great advances are being made, so there's always hope and I'm living with it rather than dying from it, that's the way I look at it," he said.

Neill, whose first name is Nigel, was born in Northern Ireland on September 14, 1947. His family moved to New Zealand when he was eight.

After attending university, he took up acting and appeared in his first film in 1971.

His big break came in the 1979 Aussie film My Brilliant Career before he played Michael Chamberlain in Evil Angels, about the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain.

But it was a turn playing the husband of then little-known Aussie actress Nicole Kidman in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm that opened Hollywood's doors and led to the role of Dr Alan Grant in the 1983 movie Jurassic Park.

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