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NEW YORK — When Olivia Munn landed her role on “Your Friends & Neighbors,” the new Apple TV+ series, it was a significant moment for the actor. Alongside stars like Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet, Munn would be appearing in her first ongoing series role in several years — a period of time in which she’d waited out the COVID-19 pandemic, become a mother, experienced almost a year of postpartum anxiety and taken steps to quit acting altogether.
But “Your Friends & Neighbors” is also the show that Munn was working on when she was finishing her treatment for breast cancer — where she first shared with anyone outside of her closest confidants that she’d received her diagnosis months earlier and had undergone the last in a series of surgeries only days before she started filming.
Now, as the show makes its debut Friday, Munn is reacclimating to life as a public figure — one who wants to share her stories about life as a parent and wife and, yes, a survivor of the cancer that had made alarming progress before it was even detected.
But, at the same time, Munn is someone who does not want any special treatment or kid-glove coddling because of what she has experienced.
“That’s how I handle life,” Munn explained in an interview last week. “I don’t like when it’s sugarcoated. I don’t like to be placated.”
She added, “Going through a year of battling cancer and five surgeries, the goal is not to be known as a sick person. The goal is to get to the other side and be back to normal.”
On a visit to New York, Munn, 44, was eagerly inhabiting her off-camera identity as a mother. She showed photos and videos of her 3-year-old son, Malcolm, and 6-month-old daughter, Méi, who were in Los Angeles with their father, John Mulaney, the comedian and late-night host who is Munn’s husband.
Munn shared quirky stories from Méi’s earliest days, like how she had forgotten to put a sound machine in her daughter’s bedroom for nearly two months (“That’s like not putting pajamas on your baby,” Munn said with chagrin), and bits of homespun wisdom about how she and Mulaney are trying to raise Malcolm not to regard his sister as a rival for his parents’ affection: “When you compare, they compete,” Munn explained.
Olivia Munn and John Mulaney announced the arrival of their second child amid her cancer battle. Munn had ‘so many profound emotions’ about surrogate pregnancy.
Just two years ago, Munn was recuperating from months of anxiety attacks that followed Malcolm’s birth. She had not worked in some time and felt unfulfilled by her acting career. While she contemplated a transition into editing, producing or writing, she said, “I called my agents and my manager and said, ‘I’m done being in front of the camera — don’t put me up for anything.’”
But she had a change of heart when she was offered a role in “Your Friends & Neighbors,” a dark comedy-drama created by Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee,” “Warrior”). On this series, Hamm, the Emmy award-winning “Mad Men” alumnus, plays Andrew, an abruptly fired hedge-fund manager and divorced dad who begins burglarizing his own affluent community to keep up his lavish lifestyle. Munn was cast as Sam, a divorcée in Hamm’s outrageously prosperous social circle who becomes his friend with benefits.
Munn, who grew up an army brat in a family that moved frequently during her childhood, said she savored “Your Friends & Neighbors” for its scathing commentary on the uppermost class of American society.
“There’s a carelessness with which they live their life,” Munn explained. “They feel impervious to the world and it’s so fascinating to watch these people crumble.” Her own character, Munn said, was “a survivor — she’s going to do anything to maintain her place and take care of her children.”
A few months later, Munn received news that would change her life in a far more drastic way. Though genetic screening and a recent mammogram had come back clear for her, she took an online exam called the Tyrer-Cuzick risk assessment test. A result of 20% on this test is considered a high risk for breast cancer — Munn’s score was 37.3%.
Olivia Munn revealed Wednesday that she was diagnosed last year with luminal B breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. She considers herself ‘lucky.’
After undergoing an MRI, Munn had a conversation with her doctor that, to this day, she describes with stunned disbelief. “I didn’t let her sit down,” Munn recalled. “I did the thing that I’ve always seen in movies. I said, ‘Is it cancer?’ She said, ‘Yes, it is cancer.’ And as she’s talking me through it, I’m thinking, this is happening to me?”
Munn compared the revelation to past moments in her life when she’d been in car accidents and could remember herself feeling, “I don’t want to be here.”
“It’s like screaming, but nobody can hear you, no matter how much I scream,” she explained. “It doesn’t matter how much I beg or cry or negotiate. I have no say in this situation. I just pray that I make it out on the other side.”
Every few days that followed, Munn learned of a new and more dire development. She tried to recount them in the interview: “You have breast cancer, it’s Stage 1,” she said. “We found more tumors. It’s multi-quadrant. Multifocal. It’s now bilateral. We found a tangerine-size section.”
Each time she was told that some aspect of her luminal B breast cancer was rare, Munn said she learned that “rare is not a good thing.”
“You’re like, when does the bad news stop?” she said.
Munn’s life became a grueling, monthslong regimen of operations and treatments. A double mastectomy. A lymph node dissection. Reconstructive surgery. A nipple delay procedure. Hormonally induced menopause. Long periods of rest and recuperation followed each time. After her final surgery, an oophorectomy and a partial hysterectomy, she took a week to recover and then started filming “Your Friends & Neighbors” in Mount Kisco, N.Y.
Just before this trip, an understandably fearful Munn phoned Tropper to tell him about her cancer diagnosis and treatment. Munn said, “‘I have to tell you I’m fine. I’ll be able to work, don’t worry. I’ll be there. I’ll show up.’ I was nervous that he would have trepidations — ‘Oh, I’ve got this sick person on set.’”
Tropper, the series creator, said in an interview that his phone conversation with Munn was the first he learned of her illness. “When someone tells you that, you just tell them that you hope they’re doing OK and their health is what’s most important. We committed to doing what we had to do on the show to make sure she was resting when she needed to rest and that we could do what we could with her schedule to make sure she got the time she needed for her health.”
He added, “It wasn’t a terribly difficult conversation at all, because she’s so amazingly candid about that — and about pretty much everything.”
Jon Hamm stars in this Apple TV+ drama as a fired hedge fund manager in crisis who resorts to stealing from his circle of friends to keep up his family’s lifestyle.
Tropper said that Munn will be back in Season 2 of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” which Apple has already renewed. “We had originally planned for that character as a one-season character,” he said, “but after working with her for a little while, I think we had consensus across the board, we wanted her.”
Peet said she began working with Munn on the series after the actor had gone public about her cancer experience. “I hugely admired her for coming forward and using it as a way to help other people, simultaneously with going through it herself and getting used to what had happened to her,” she said.
“She has a very natural sisterly instinct,” added Peet, who plays Andrew’s ex-wife Mel. “She contains multitudes. She has a lot of joie de vivre. She wants to drink all the marrow out of the moment. I have a feeling she’s always been that way.”
Even with the support of her colleagues, Munn wrestled with other challenges on a show that often depicts her character in intimate situations. “I was really nervous about doing any sex scenes because I have a lot of scars,” she said. “Scars that can be seen in clothing and scars that you wouldn’t know unless I was completely nude.”
At the same time, Munn felt these scenes were crucial to understanding the dynamic between her and Hamm’s characters. “She wants something so much more from him than he’s willing to give and their only connection is through sex,” Munn said. “I really wanted that to be portrayed. I wanted the sex scenes to feel like sex scenes — I wanted them to feel visceral and intense and not hold back at all.”
With the help of an intimacy coordinator and a lot of soul searching, Munn made it through these performances. “I did feel insecure, but each time I did it, I felt better,” she said.
Far from feeling like her body betrayed her by getting sick, she said, “I’m so grateful for my body because it got me through this.”
Munn gratefully reports that she is cancer-free, though with that gratitude, she said, comes a feeling that “I will be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.” But she can also reflect on her ordeal now and laugh at, say, a monologue that Mulaney performed about her fumbling with a post-treatment phenomenon called “cancer brain” in a recent broadcast of his Netflix late-night series, “Everybody’s Live.”
Though Munn said she did not consult with Mulaney on that routine, she explained, “I trust him implicitly. I love his comedy. He loves our family and he loves me. We make so many jokes about my journey through this and who I am. I watched it — and he’ll hate me for saying this — but that was his way of saying, ‘I love you.’”
Munn is constantly reminded now of how closely her past and present are intertwined, and how much the person she is today is influenced by the person she once was — even in everyday trips with her family to the Sunset Gower studios where Mulaney currently tapes “Everybody’s Live,” and where Munn formerly filmed “The Newsroom,” the HBO series where she was a part of its ensemble cast.
Describing one of those recent trips with Mulaney and their children, Munn said, “On our way into his offices, we pass by a poster of ‘The Newsroom,’ and Malcolm will be like, ‘That’s mama.’ Then we go by and he sees, like, Viola Davis, and he says, ‘That’s mama.’”
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