Action icon Dolph Lundgren has revealed in an interview on In Depth With Graham Bensinger that he’s been privately battling cancer, on and off, over the last eight years.
Doctors reportedly first discovered and removed a cancerous tumor on the actor’s kidney in 2015. He says he did scans every six months, then every year and it was fine for around five years.
Then in 2020 he was back in Sweden and “had some kind of acid reflux or… I didn’t know what it was.” They did an MRI and “found there were a few more tumors around the area.” Six in total.
One of those tumors had grown too large to remove, so he had to start systemic therapy. Further tumors were then discovered in the fall of 2021 as Lundgren arrived in London to film the second “Aquaman” and fourth “Expendables” film. Lundgren said:
“We realized it was a lot worse than we thought. [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 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.”
Lundgren then got a second opinion from an oncologist who discovered his kidney cancer was mutating more like lung cancer which led to an overhaul of his treatment.
That started shrinking his tumors by upwards of 90%. Now with that reduction, Lundgren added that he’ll have to undergo surgery to remove them. After that, the hope is for no further cancer activity.
Lundgren will be seen later this year in “The Expendables 4” on September 22nd and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” on December 20th.
Source: In Depth With Graham Bensinger
