Dolph Lundgren has opened up about his cancer diagnosis for the first time – the actor has been living privately with the disease for the past eight years.
Lundgren's first tumor was discovered on his kidney in 2015. After monitoring the situation with scans every six months, "a few more" tumors were found in 2020, one of which was too large to remove. Even more were discovered in 2021 after he arrived in London to film Aquaman 2 and The Expendables 4.
"We realized it was a lot worse than we thought," Lundgren said during an appearance on In Depth With Graham Bensinger. "[The doctor] kind of started talking about all these different tumors, like, in the lung and the stomach and the spine, outside the kidneys. He started saying these things like, 'you should probably take a break and spend more time with your family,' and so forth. I asked him 'how long do you think I’ve got left?' I think he said two or three years, but I could tell in his voice that he probably thought it was less."
While in London, the actor received a second opinion from a doctor who said that the kidney cancer was mutating into lung cancer and changed tact with his treatment accordingly.
"2022 was basically watching these medications do their thing," Lundgren continued. "Finally things had shrunk to about 90%. Now I’m in the process of taking out the remaining scar tissue in those tumors… The prognosis is that, hopefully, when they take these out, there’s no cancer activity and the medication that I’m taking is gonna suppress everything else."
Lundgren went on to film his upcoming movies as planned – Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, in which he plays King Nereus, and The Expendables 4 are both set to hit the big screen later this year.
Our thoughts are with him.
