Dolph Lundgren is opening up about his ongoing cancer battle.
The “Rocky” actor revealed he was told he only had “two or three years” left to live after his kidney cancer spread in fall 2021. Lundgren was in London at the time to begin production on “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” and “The Expendables 4.”
“We realized it was a lot worse than we thought,” Lundgren said during the latest “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” interview (below). “[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 a break and spend more time with your family,’ and so forth.”
Lundgren continued, “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.”
The actor’s cancer was first discovered in 2015 when a tumor was removed.
“Then I did scans every six months, then you do it every year and it was fine, you know, for five years,” Lundgren said. “In 2020, I was back in Sweden and had some kind of acid reflux or… I didn’t know what it was. So I did an MRI and they found there were a few more tumors around the area.”
Six more tumors were discovered by doctors, leading to Lundgren beginning systemic therapy and treatment that mirrored how lung cancer is handled.
“If I had gone on the other treatment, I’d have had about three to four months left,” Lundgren said, citing that the lung cancer treatment has been shrinking his tumors by around 30 percent within a three-month period.
“2022 was basically watching these medications do their thing,” Lundgren summed up. “Finally things had shrunk to about 90 percent. Now I’m in the process of taking out the remaining scar tissue in those tumors…The prognosis is that, hopefully, when they take these out, there’s no cancer activity and the medication that I’m taking is going to suppress everything else.”
