The 76-year-old – well known for his roles on the big and small screen – previously wrote about his journey with stage-three blood cancer when he penned his memoir a year ago. Speaking to on Monday, Neill said he wrote the book while going through treatment when he “had nothing else to do”, as he also touched on his dislike of the modern superhero blockbuster and thinking about his mother’s journey from Northern Ireland halfway around the world when she “signed up to marry Dad”. The Peaky Blinders star told the newspaper: “The truth was, I didn’t know how long I had to live.
What I had was aggressive. I thought I’d better scribble down some stuff before I shuffle. "[I was] stuck in Sydney, getting chemo, I had nothing else to do, and the idea of having nothing to do was unbearable.
” Neill’s family moved from Northern Ireland to New Zealand in the 1950s where they settled in Christchurch. He told The Guardian: “I sometimes think about my mother, who never complained about anything in her life. I don’t think, when she signed up to marry Dad, that she imagined she’d be halfway across the world and have to leave her mother and all her friends, and start again.
"But I was seven years old; I didn’t know any different.” Meanwhile, the actor also spoke about the current state of the movie industry, suggesting he doesn’t particularly like the modern blockbuster –although he made cameos in the two most recent Thor films. "Now we’re in the age of Marvel action films, people destroying entire cities on a whim, they’re not particularly interesting to me,” he said.
“The great years of cinema were the 50s through to the 70s. “People running studios [previously] really wanted to make good movies. They weren’t so much interested in making hundreds of millions, or ideally billions, of dollars.
They were just making movies; that’s rare these days.” The father-of-two added: "I didn’t want to bring up my children in LA. I didn’t think that would be good for them.
“And I didn’t love LA. I really didn’t like living there. We went there for a year and a half and I wasn’t happy.
"There was nothing but show business. No other conversations, no other interests. It bores the s*** out of me.
That’s why my life now is half performance and half rural. I farm, I grow wine, and that keeps me sane. If I was only doing one, I’d go absolutely nuts.
“Being a celebrity and being an actor are two separate jobs. I would rate myself as a reasonably successful film and television actor. I don’t rate myself as a film star.
I can go to Starbucks, no one bugs me. “I tell them my name. They don’t know me.
I’ve got friends who are really famous and I wouldn’t have their lives for anything.” Neill is currently filming Untamed, a new Netflix series. Meanwhile the second series of Australian courtroom drama The Twelve will stream on ITVX exclusively from Thursday 15 August.
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