Dolph Lundgren has gone public for the first time with the cancer battle he’s been fighting since 2015.
The Rocky actor shared this revelation in a recent appearance on In Depth with Graham Bensinger. He said doctors first found and treated a tumor on his kidney. Lundgren said that for five years, his semi-annual cancer scans came back clear. Then, in 2020, an MRI detected an additional six tumors in other areas of his body.
After Lundgren had surgery to remove those tumors, another tumor on his liver was found. Unfortunately, due to it being the size of “a small lemon,” it was deemed too big to remove. As a result, he underwent systemic therapy. This resulted in some intense side effects, including diarrhea and major weight loss.
Lundgren then detailed a lack of communication from his doctors in Los Angeles while he was in London filming The Expendables 4 and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. He said his doctors advised him to “take a break and spend more time with your family.” At one point, doctors told him he had two or three years left.
Fortunately, Lundgren sought out a different oncologist for a second opinion. This doctor was able to discover his tumors for kidney cancer shared a similar mutation found in lung cancer. Lundgren’s cancer was treated in accordance with a lung cancer treatment, which resulted in his tumors shrinking by 90% in size.
“Now I’m in the process of taking out the remaining scar tissue of these tumors,” said Lundgren. ” … Hopefully when they take these out, there is no cancer activity, and the medication that I’m taking is going to suppress everything else.”