Olivia Munn got candid about her breast cancer diagnosis and fertility journey while speaking at a panel during Hello Sunshine’s Shine Away event connected by AT&T on Saturday, October 5, in Los Angeles.
Us Weekly was in attendance when Munn, 44, detailed her decision to freeze her eggs multiple times throughout her 30s and 40s — including a recent attempt to secure girl embryos. The actress admitted that she really wanted a daughter with her husband, comedian John Mulaney, after the natural conception of their son, Malcolm, in November 2021.
“I told John, ‘I won’t feel good until we get two more [embryos that are girls] so I need you to just be on my side and let me go through this. And I know I’m putting myself at risk, but I just have to do this,’” Munn explained of freezing her eggs again at 42 amid her cancer battle. “And he said, ‘I’ll support whatever you want to do.’ We got home that day and the doctor said, ‘I got the results back, and it’s the dream. You have two healthy baby girl embryos.’ And now we have Méi.”
Munn and Mulaney, 42, welcomed their daughter, Méi June, via surrogate on September 14.
“I had so many profound emotions about not being able to carry my daughter,” Munn wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of her and Mulaney with Méi. “When I first met our gestational surrogate we spoke mother-to-mother. She showed me so much grace and understanding, I knew I had found a real-life angel. Words cannot express my gratitude that she kept our baby safe for 9 months and made our dreams come true.”
During the Hello Sunshine event, Munn was joined onstage by her doctor, Thais Aliabadi, and The Home Edit’s Clea Shearer, who also shared their personal experiences with breast cancer during the “Be Your Own Best Advocate” panel.
“Clea was the second call that I made [after the diagnosis], because I knew she had gone through it,” Munn said. “She was in a taxi cab in New York, and she was like, ‘What’s going on?’ I told her, ‘I have breast cancer. Tell me what’s going to happen to me.’ She was very clear and very direct and because she was able to speak out and knew about it, it helped me so much. It doesn’t just save lives, it saves your sanity.”
Shearer revealed she had breast cancer in a poignant Instagram post in 2022, and has continued to share her story with followers and fans. Munn shared her own diagnosis on the platform in March.
“Some people have commented this on my IG post … ‘Welcome to the worst club with the best members.’ It really made me feel so good because everyone has been touched by cancer in many different forms, and speaking out about it was incredibly healing,” Munn said.
“Keeping it private for a long time, and asking people I love to keep it private as well, I think maybe made us all a little sick in our own ways,” she added. “My husband kept saying, ‘God, you were walking with cancer and you didn’t know it. If we didn’t do it now, like your mammogram wasn’t scheduled for every year, what would have happened?’ Speaking out has been incredibly healing and every time we meet someone, it means a lot. It changes your entire focus.”
Munn is now fully in tune with her body and admitted that she’s learned to be “kinder” to herself after facing such a scary situation.
“I didn’t think I realized how hard I was on myself,” she said during the panel. “I made a lot of mistakes in my life, done a lot of silly things when I was younger, or said dumb things or walked away from opportunities that were great … I was hard on myself, and I didn’t forgive myself a lot. And once this happened, I dropped all that baggage. I was about to go through a battle for my life, and I didn’t have the energy to hold on to it anymore. I had to let it go. There was such a freedom to that. I’m kinder to myself now.”
In an October 3 Instagram post, Munn shed light on Breast Cancer Awareness Month and thanked Aliabadi for putting her on “the path to survival.”
“This time last year I was recovering from my fourth surgery,” she wrote alongside a photo of her and Méi, “and now I’m hanging with my baby girl. 🥹💕.”
“Every time a doctor says, ‘That’s nothing to worry about,’ tell yourself that there is no victory in proving your doctor wrong,” Munn said at the Saturday event. “No, you don’t win. Nobody wins against cancer in the way when you ignore it. Cancer wants you to pretend it’s not there. Cancer wants you to be naive. Cancer wants you to listen to your doctor who says it’s nothing. Cancer wants you to ignore it so it can grow freely wherever it wants in your body. So if you have an instinct, go with that. Go against your doctor. Your doctor is there for you. If you want to get this done, get it done. And by the way, if you’re wrong, who cares? Because when you’re right, that’s gonna save your life.”
With reporting by Mike Vulpo
