He will appear alongside Annette Bening in the upcoming television series Apples Never Fall, based on the novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty.

In a wide-ranging interview with Saturday Morning, Neill said it was 'absolutely fantastic' to be working again after not having done so for the past year.

'I got an immediate response from all three publishers saying, 'we love your book, and we really want to publish it'. 'I actually didn't know how long I had to live, so it was written probably more hurriedly than I would have otherwise.'Īfter a time, Neill said he realised the stories collectively seemed to have a narrative of some kind, though it took encouragement from a friend of a friend to convince him to send the manuscript to some publishers. He described the process as 'writing against the clock'. 'I'm used to doing things - more or less - with my brain, and I had nothing to exercise it with, so I started to write down stories.' Neill said he began writing his memoir after suddenly finding himself marooned in his flat with no work to do, post-diagnosis. He has been in remission for about eight months, he said.

'The first couple of days after the chemo are pretty miserable, to be honest, and then on day three I start to perk up and then I feel just wonderful again.' His treatments are ongoing and while they knocked him around, Neill said he was 'not complaining'. 'When the first lot of chemo failed and it looked like I was on the way out, I was signed up for a new type of chemo.' 'If there is one thing that cancer teaches you, it is how great it is to be alive,' he said.

Among the revelations in his book is that he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer a year ago.Īn initial 18-week round of chemotherapy to treat the stage three lymphoma was not successful, Neill told RNZ, however his cancer is now in remission after he was put on a new treatment regime.

Everybody changing piano