The late Sam Neill filmed a surprise role in the forthcoming Legend of Zelda adaptation before his death.

The Jurassic Park star died of pneumonia aged 78 in July, less than three months after announcing that he was cancer free.

While the actor can be seen later this year in The Fox, a new Australian black comedy starring Jai Courtney, Emily Browning and Olivia Colman, new reports have claimed that another surprise Neill project is on the way.

As reported by Deadline, Neill has an undisclosed role in the upcoming big-screen adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, which wrapped filming in April.

Many years in the making, the live-action adaptation of Disney’s popular video game began filming in November 2025.

Benjamin Evan Ainsworth has already been announced as Link, with Bo Bragason playing Princess Zelda; this week, it was revealed that Australian actor Uli Latukefu will play villain Ganondorf, with The Handmaid’s Tale’s Yvonne Strahovski and Severance’s Dichen Lachman also joining the cast.

The Legend of Zelda is currently scheduled for release in April 2027, making it one of Neill’s final screen roles, if not the last.

Neill’s representative Philip Grenz confirmed that the New Zealand actor had remained professionally active in the months before his death.

Responding to “inaccuracies and outright falsehoods” regarding the circumstances of Neill’s death, Grenz said: “Sam passed away from pneumonia. Prior to becoming sick, Sam had valiantly fought and beaten lymphoma through a new treatment called CAR-T therapy.

“Sam had filmed four projects back-to-back during the past year, all of which will be released within the coming months,” he added.

Back in 2022, Neill was diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Having detailed the “brutal” form of chemotherapy he had to take every month in his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, Neill explained in April that he’d begun CAR T-cell therapy, a form of treatment that genetically modifies patients’ blood cells and is only being used in clinical trials in Australia.

“I’ve had a scan just now, and there is no cancer in my body. This is an extraordinary thing,” he said.

Months later, Neill’s death was announced by his family, who wrote on Instagram that he had remained cancer-free since completing his initial treatment in 2022 and that his death had been “sudden and unexpected”.

Neill was a New Zealand icon best known for playing palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park franchise, but other notable credits across his career included playing everything from romantic leads to memorable villains in Omen III: The Final Conflict, Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Jane Campion's Oscar-winning drama The Piano, Possession, Event Horizon, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Tudors, and Peaky Blinders.