Olivia Munn has been living with breast cancer for nearly a year and has undergone four surgeries, including a double mastectomy, in the past ten months. The actor announced the news in an Instagram post on Wednesday, just three days after attending the Oscars with her boyfriend, John Mulaney. She said in the post that she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.
“In February of 2023, in an effort to be more proactive about my health, I took a genetic test that checks you for 90 cancer genes. I tested negative for all, including BRCA (the most well-known breast cancer gene),” she wrote in a lengthy note shared in the post, saying she was diagnosed just two months later.
Munn’s doctor, Thaïs Aliabadi, had decided to calculate her Breast Cancer Risk Assessment score as a precaution. “The fact that she did saved my life,” Munn wrote. The assessment, which took her age, the fact that she had a child after the age of 30, and her family history of breast cancer into consideration, found that the actor’s lifetime risk was 37 percent. Munn had an MRI, an ultrasound, and a biopsy after receiving the score. The biopsy showed that she had luminal B cancer — which she described as “an aggressive, fast-moving cancer”— in both breasts. Munn says she had a double mastectomy a month later.
The post includes photos and videos of Munn in hospital rooms as she undergoes various tests and procedures. “I’ve tended to let people see me when I have energy, when I can get dressed and get out of the house, when I can take my baby boy to the park,” she wrote. “I’ve kept the diagnosis and the worry and the recovery and the pain medicine and the paper gowns private.”
Munn went on to thank her doctors, friends, and family. She gave a special shout-out to Mulaney “for being there before I went into each surgery and being there when I woke up, always placing framed photos of little boy Malcolm so it would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes.”
Munn said she hadn’t previously disclosed anything about her diagnosis and experience because she needed to catch her breath “and get through some of the hardest parts before sharing.” She urged women to ask their doctors to calculate their Breast Cancer Risk Assessment scores.