Sam Neill Remembers Robin Williams: He Was "The Saddest Person I Ever Met"

Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) has shared his memories of Robin Williams in his upcoming memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?. Neill had the opportunity to work with Williams in the 1999 film Bicentennial Man, and while it was a special experience for him, he also noticed how sad Willams was.

Neill talked about the “great chats” throughout their visits with each other in their trailers, saying: “We would talk about this and that, sometimes even about the work we were about to do. He went on to describe Williams as being “irresistibly, outrageously, irrepressibly, gigantically funny.”

While the two were having a great time with each other, Neill sensed something was wrong, and called Williams, “The saddest person I ever met.” He went on to write:

“He had fame, he was rich, people loved him, great kids—the world was his oyster. And yet I felt more sorry for him than I can express. He was the loneliest man on a lonely planet. Williams seemed “inconsolably solitary and deeply depressed.”

Neill theorized that Williams used his humor as a form of self-medication, saying “funny stuff just poured out of him, and everybody was in stitches, and when everybody was in stitches, you could see Robin was happy.”

Williams died by suicide at the age of 63 on August 11, 2014.

Source: Deadline