Rocky IV star Dolph Lundgren is revealing a private cancer battle he has gone through for the past eight years.
The 65-year-old Swedish actor opened up about his health scare during an interview on In Depth with Graham Bensinger, telling the host that doctors successfully removed a cancerous tumor in his kidney in 2015.
Lundgren said routine scans were “fine” for five years until doctors found “a few more tumors around the area” after doing an MRI in 2020.
Six more tumors were surgically removed, but doctors later told him that one tumor had grown to “the size of a small lemon.” Side effects from therapy for it started taking a toll on his body.
Lundgren said his doctor told him to “take a break and spend more time with family … So I kind of asked him, ‘How long do you think I’ve got left?’ And I think he said two or three years, but I could tell in his voice that he probably thought it was less,” he recalled. “I thought it was it for sure.”
The Creed II star said he wasn’t “bitter” after hearing this news, as he’s had “a frickin’ great life” and has “lived like five lifetimes in one already with everything I’ve done,” but he did feel bad for his loved ones, including his two daughters, Ida and Greta, and his fiancée, Emma Krokdal.
Happily, Lundgren sought a second opinion, and his new doctor discovered a mutation in one of the tumors that opened the door to additional treatments, which started working within months.
By 2022 the tumors had shrunk by about “90 percent,” he said.
Lundgren will be seen in two big movies later this year: September’s Expendables 4, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, out December 20.
Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
