Olivia Munn is opening up about documenting her emotional breast cancer journey and how her son was at the forefront of her decision.
“Cancer is the — that’s the word you don't want to hear," Munn, 43, told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America in an interview that aired on May 16. "There’s 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 continued, referring to her 2-year-old son, Malcolm, whom she shares with her partner, John Mulaney.
Asked by Strahan, 52, why she wanted to document her journey, the actress replied, “Well, 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. You want the people in your life, you want the people that maybe don't understand what's going on right to know that you did everything you could to be here."
The Newsroom star was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer in April 2023 and shared her diagnosis on social media a year later, revealing in March that she had a double mastectomy after an MRI found luminal B — a fast-moving, aggressive cancer — in both of her breasts.
Speaking on Good Morning America, Munn said part of the treatment for the luminal B cancer was to suppress the production of hormones that cause it to grow. She was put into medically induced menopause, which prevented her from spending quality time with Malcolm.
“The hormone suppression therapy is brutal and it gave me next-level debilitating exhaustion,” she recalled to GMA. “I was just in bed all day long, all day long, and my quality of life was so minimal and I wasn’t able to be there for my baby.”
“Whenever Malcolm would come into the home, he’d run straight to my bed because that's where he knows I am, like that’s what he associated with me,” she continued. “And that was just too difficult for me to take. I had to find out if there was another option.”
She decided to get a hysterectomy and oophorectomy but wanted to do an egg retrieval before the surgeries so that she and Mulaney, 41, could still have the option to have more children.
Opening up about her decision to freeze her eggs, an emotional Munn shared, "John and I had a long talk about it. We realized that we weren’t done growing our family."
“That’s a scary process because I have a cancer that feeds off of hormones, so I knew there was a risk and our doctor said, 'Look, we’re gonna get one for you and then we’re gonna call it,' ” she explained. “And then our doctor called and he said, 'Hey, we got the results back. It’s two healthy embryos,' and I— I mean we just started bawling, crying, both of us.”
The X-Men: Apocalypse star told Strahan that her doctor planned to start her on another drug to suppress cancer-producing hormones in other areas of the body, though she admitted she was hesitant.
“It’s so tiring,” she said. “These drugs are so tiring, and I know I’m gonna stay aggressive. I know I’m going to do it. I’m just surprised that I’m even asking for anything less than aggressive because, as you know, it just feels nonstop because it is nonstop.”
However, Munn added that this battle with cancer has taught her that she is “a lot braver than I thought I was.”
“And I learned that the most important thing to me in life is my family,” she added. “Everything else can go away. I don't have my career, I don't have my body the way that it looked before, but as long as the people that I love and care about are here and healthy and thriving, nothing else matters.”
Last month, Munn, who underwent four surgeries in 10 months, also opened up about her journey and shared how Mulaney has been by her side every step of the way.
“I was not someone who obsessed over death or was afraid of it in any way, but having a little baby at home made everything much more terrifying," she told.
“It would’ve felt like climbing an iceberg without him,” Munn continued about Mulaney. “I don’t think he had a moment to himself, between being an incredibly hands-on father and going to and from the hospital — taking Malcolm to the park, putting him to nap, driving to Cedars-Sinai, hanging out with me, going home, putting Malcolm to bed, coming back to me. And he did it all happily.”
The Quran - Chapter Adh-Dhariyat : 25
˹Remember˺ when they entered his presence and greeted ˹him with˺, “Peace!” He replied, “Peace ˹be upon you˺!” ˹Then he said to himself,˺ “These people must be strangers!”
Comforting the Messenger of Allah
فَقَالُوا سَلَامًا قَالَ سَلَامٌ ("We greet you with salam." He said, "Salam on you." 51:25). The angels greeted him with salaman in the accusative case, whereas Holy Prophet Ibrahim (علیہ السلام) responded to the greeting in the -nominative case thus: salamun.
The nominative case in Arabic is a nominal sentence which carries the sense of greater strength, continuity and persistence.
The Qur'anic injunction is that 'when you are greeted with a salutation, greet one better than it...', so Holy Prophet Ibrahim (علیہ السلام) the Friend of Allah chose a better reply, implementing Allah's command: reciprocating the greeting with the term salaman is stronger than the greeting using the term salaman.
قَوْمٌ مُّنكَرُونَ ("[ They are ] unknown people."... 51:25). The word munkar, the letter [م m ] carrying dammah and the letter [ ک k ] carrying fath means "unknown".
As sin or sinful work is unknown in Islam, it is also referred to as munkar. The angels came to Holy Prophet Ibrahim (علیہ السلام) in the image of handsome young wonderfully graceful men; therefore he could not recognize them.
He thought to himself that these are strangers and said to himself 'They are unknown to me'. Or it is possible that he might have mentioned this to the guests in the form of a question and the purpose might have been to find out who they were.
