Olivia Munn shares more about her breast cancer journey
Two months after opening up about her breast cancer diagnosis, actress Olivia Munn shares even more about her journey. “Privately, people are battling things that you would never know,” Munn told Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan after getting cancer treatment for 10 months.
Munn said she is speaking out and sharing more of her personal experience in the hopes her story will help others.
The actress first opened up about her private health battle on social media in March and revealed at the time that she had been unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer last year.
Munn told Strahan that at first when she heard the word “cancer,” she quickly thought of her son Malcolm, whom she shares with her partner, comedian John Mulaney.
“I mean, honestly, I just thought of my baby,” Munn said. “You know, cancer is the — that’s the word you don’t wanna hear. There are a lot of other things that you feel like you can beat. But you know, cancer takes down a lot of people. And I just thought about my baby.”
Munn said she was diagnosed with stage 1 aggressive Luminal B breast cancer in both breasts in April 2023.
“They said that if I was extremely aggressive, that I could fight this and win,” Munn said. But, at the same time, once they started finding all of these little spots in my breasts like, ‘Oh, there’s another tumor. There’s another tumor,’ there was such an urgency to it because we had to get in and make some really big decisions.”
Munn also shared an emotional, raw moment of herself on video with her doctor.
In the clip, her doctor tells Munn, “Do it for him, do it for your baby,” before hugging her. Then, Munn is captured on camera saying, “I’m ready.”
Munn told Strahan that at that moment, she was unsure whether or not she was ready for surgery.
“I just had to say it. You know, sometimes … you just say it and hope that your body will go with it,” the 43-year-old said.
Munn also said her partner John Mulaney has been one of her biggest supporters along her journey, making her laugh as she faces enormous challenges.
“He’s honestly just the best human being. He comes to everything in life with so much compassion and understanding,” she said.
“But the one problem is that he makes me laugh so much, there’s times I’m like, ‘You have to leave the room,'” she added. “I just say, ‘Leave the room. You have to leave. You’re gonna make me angry now because … I’m going to, you know, literally pop a stitch.'”
Instead of going through the treatment privately, Munn admitted she pratically made the decision to document her cancer battle for her son
“Because if I didn’t make it, I wanted my son when he got older to know that I fought to be here. That I tried my best,” she explained. “You want the people in your life, you want that people that maybe don’t understand what is going on right now to know that you did everything you could to be here.”
