Remembering Sam Neill, the Actor Who Made the Impossible Feel Real

After releasing his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? in 2023, Sam Neill spoke to The Guardian about the possibility of dying. “I’m not afraid to die,” he said. “But it would annoy me. 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, and 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.” I’ve been revisiting this conversation ever since the legendary New Zealand actor’s family announced on Instagram early on the morning of July 13, 2026, that he had passed “unexpectedly” in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 78. 

It would be too easy to say that Neill, whose eclectic five-decade-long-career has taken him from playing a wild-eyed, pettily cruel spy whose marriage has suddenly imploded in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, to a brilliant engineer sent to investigate the return of a doomed spaceship in Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon, to even auditioning for the role of James Bond, will be remembered as one of the most versatile actors of his generation, and perhaps, as one of the most beloved actors of all time. We’ve known this long before his passing, long before he was diagnosed with stage 3 angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (he was cancer-free at the time of his death), long before we found ourselves trying to measure the legacy he left behind.