Olivia Munn Reveals She Froze Her Eggs to Have Future Babies with John Mulaney
The actress has been candid about how her recent breast cancer diagnosis has impacted her journey as a mother
Olivia Munn is opening up about her decision to freeze her eggs, just weeks after revealing she had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
In a new interview with Vogue, the X-Men: Apocalypse actress, 43, shared that she has frozen her eggs on three different occasions — when she was 33, 39 and most recently 42, following her breast cancer diagnosis.
“It's interesting because my 33-year-old eggs were great. My 39-year-old eggs? None of them worked," Munn told the outlet. "As you get older, one month can have great eggs, the other not so much."
"Clearly, the month we did at 39 was not a good month. After my diagnosis, we decided to try one more round of egg retrievals and hoped it was a good month. John and I talked about it a lot and we don't feel like we're done growing our family, but didn't know if I would have to do chemotherapy or radiation," she said, referring to her son Malcolm, 2, whom she shares with comedian John Mulaney.
Related: Olivia Munn, 43, Reveals She Was Diagnosed with Breast Cancer and Had Double Mastectomy
According to the actress' doctors, breast cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation can significantly hinder a person's ability to have children and, in some cases, can remove the option completely — especially because Munn's treatment involved purposefully sending her body into menopause, Vogue reported.
Before she went all-out and committed to undergoing "aggressive" treatment for her luminal B-type cancer, Munn said that she and Mulaney, 41, discussed putting her treatment on hold so that she could undergo her final round of egg retrieval. Although she acknowledged it was dangerous — considering that pumping herself full of hormones needed for egg retrieval could result in more nascent cancer cells growing — she said she and Mulaney had decided to give it one more shot.
“We just wanted a few more eggs,” she told Vogue. “At my age, one in every 10 eggs are healthy, and we were hoping to make one embryo from this retrieval.”
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Doctors ended up collecting seven eggs instead of 10 from her final retrieval, and all that was left to do was for Munn and Mulaney to wait and see if any of them resulted in the creation of a healthy embryo.
"A few hours later, we got the call from my doctor. He shared that we had two healthy embryos," Munn recalled. "John and I just started crying. It was just so exciting because not only did we get it in one retrieval, but it also meant that I didn't have to keep putting myself at risk. It was just amazing."
Munn later shared her cancer diagnosis with the public in March 2024, revealing that she had undergone a double mastectomy. The actress used the opportunity to encourage others to undergo cancer checks and be proactive about their health.
"We are very protective of our little life, but I knew from the day she was diagnosed that the risk assessment test her doctor had done open-and-shut saved her life,” Mulaney told Vogue of his partner's decision to share her cancer diagnosis with the public. "So, while we like to lead our life privately, I was completely supportive of Olivia sharing her story."
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Read the original article on People.