NEW YORK — When Olivia Munn landed her function on “Your Friends & Neighbors,” the brand new Apple TV+ collection, it was a major second for the actor. Alongside stars like Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet, Munn could be showing in her first ongoing collection function in a number of years — a time frame by which she’d waited out the COVID-19 pandemic, turn out to be a mom, skilled virtually a yr of postpartum anxiousness and brought steps to stop appearing altogether.
However “Your Friends & Neighbors” can also be the present that Munn was engaged on when she was ending her therapy for breast most cancers — the place she first shared with anybody exterior of her closest confidants that she’d obtained her prognosis months earlier and had undergone the final in a collection of surgical procedures solely days earlier than she began filming.
Now, because the present makes its debut Friday, Munn is reacclimating to life as a public determine — one who needs to share her tales about life as a mother or father and spouse and, sure, a survivor of the most cancers that had made alarming progress earlier than it was even detected.
However, on the identical time, Munn is somebody who doesn’t need any particular therapy or kid-glove coddling due to what she has skilled.
“That’s how I handle life,” Munn defined in an interview final 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.”
Olivia Munn is making her return to tv with Apple TV+’s “Your Friends & Neighbors.”
(Apple)
On a go to to New York, Munn, 44, was eagerly inhabiting her off-camera identification as a mom. She confirmed photographs and movies of her 3-year-old son, Malcolm, and 6-month-old daughter, Méi, who had been in Los Angeles with their father, John Mulaney, the comic and late-night host who’s Munn’s husband.
Munn shared quirky tales from Méi’s earliest days, like how she had forgotten to place a sound machine in her daughter’s bed room for practically two months (“That’s like not putting pajamas on your baby,” Munn stated with chagrin), and bits of homespun knowledge about how she and Mulaney are attempting to lift Malcolm to not regard his sister as a rival for his dad and mom’ affection: “When you compare, they compete,” Munn defined.
Simply two years in the past, Munn was recuperating from months of tension assaults that adopted Malcolm’s beginning. She had not labored in a while and felt unfulfilled by her appearing profession. Whereas she contemplated a transition into enhancing, producing or writing, she stated, “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.’”
However she had a change of coronary heart when she was provided a task in “Your Friends & Neighbors,” a darkish comedy-drama created by Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee,” “Warrior”). On this collection, Hamm, the Emmy award-winning “Mad Men” alumnus, performs Andrew, an abruptly fired hedge-fund supervisor and divorced dad who begins burglarizing his personal prosperous neighborhood to maintain up his lavish way of life. Munn was forged as Sam, a divorcée in Hamm’s outrageously affluent social circle who turns into his buddy with advantages.
“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,’” stated Olivia Munn, however when she was provided her function in “Your Friends & Neighbors,” she had a change of coronary heart.
(JSquared Images / For The Occasions)
Munn, who grew up a military brat in a household that moved regularly throughout her childhood, stated 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 defined. “They feel impervious to the world and it’s so fascinating to watch these people crumble.” Her personal character, Munn stated, was “a survivor — she’s going to do anything to maintain her place and take care of her children.”
After present process an MRI, Munn had a dialog along with her physician that, to this present day, she describes with surprised 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 in contrast the revelation to previous moments in her life when she’d been in automobile accidents and will keep in mind 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 defined. “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.”
Each few days that adopted, Munn discovered of a brand new and extra dire growth. She tried to recount them within the interview: “You have breast cancer, it’s Stage 1,” she stated. “We found more tumors. It’s multi-quadrant. Multifocal. It’s now bilateral. We found a tangerine-size section.”
“It’s like screaming, but nobody can hear you, no matter how much I scream,” Olivia Munn stated about her breast most cancers prognosis. “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.”
(JSquared Images / For The Occasions)
Every time she was advised that some side of her luminal B breast most cancers was uncommon, Munn stated she discovered that “rare is not a good thing.”
Munn’s life grew to become a grueling, monthslong routine of operations and coverings. A double mastectomy. A lymph node dissection. Reconstructive surgical procedure. A nipple delay process. Hormonally induced menopause. Lengthy durations of relaxation and recuperation adopted every time. After her ultimate surgical procedure, an oophorectomy and a partial hysterectomy, she took every week to get better after which began filming “Your Friends & Neighbors” in Mount Kisco, N.Y.
Simply earlier than this journey, an understandably fearful Munn phoned Tropper to inform him about her most cancers prognosis and therapy. Munn stated, “‘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 collection creator, stated in an interview that his telephone dialog with Munn was the primary he discovered of her sickness. “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.”
Tropper stated that Munn might be again 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 stated, “but after working with her for a little while, I think we had consensus across the board, we wanted her.”
Peet stated she started working with Munn on the collection after the actor had gone public about her most cancers expertise. “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 stated.
“She has a very natural sisterly instinct,” added Peet, who performs 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 help of her colleagues, Munn wrestled with different challenges on a present that always depicts her character in intimate conditions. “I was really nervous about doing any sex scenes because I have a lot of scars,” she stated. “Scars that can be seen in clothing and scars that you wouldn’t know unless I was completely nude.”
Because of the procedures she needed to endure, “I was really nervous about doing any sex scenes because I have a lot of scars,” Olivia Munn stated.
(Apple)
On the identical time, Munn felt these scenes had been essential 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 stated. “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 assistance of an intimacy coordinator and loads of soul looking out, Munn made it by way of these performances. “I did feel insecure, but each time I did it, I felt better,” she stated.
Removed from feeling like her physique betrayed her by getting sick, she stated, “I’m so grateful for my body because it got me through this.”
Munn gratefully experiences that she is cancer-free, although with that gratitude, she stated, comes a sense that “I will be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.” However she will additionally replicate on her ordeal now and snicker at, say, a monologue that Mulaney carried out about her fumbling with a post-treatment phenomenon referred to as “cancer brain” in a latest broadcast of his Netflix late-night collection, “Everybody’s Live.”
Although Munn stated she didn’t seek the advice of with Mulaney on that routine, she defined, “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.’”
