Sam Neill Remembers The Late Robin Williams: “The Saddest Person I Ever Met” - Deadline

Sam Neill has special memories of Robin Williams, who worked with him in 1999’s Bicentennial Man.

“We would talk about this and that, sometimes even about the work we were about to do,” he said, calling Williams “irresistibly, outrageously, irrepressibly, gigantically funny.”

But even during those good times, Neill could sense something was wrong, calling Williams, “The saddest person I ever met.”

“He had fame, he was rich, people loved him, great kids—the world was his oyster.

He was the loneliest man on a lonely planet,” Neill wrote.Williams seemed “inconsolably solitary and deeply depressed.”

Williams used humor as a form of self-medication, Neill theorized, saying “funny stuff just poured out of him.”