Dolph Lundgren Reveals 8-Year Battle With Cancer

Dolph Lundgren has been secretly battling cancer for the last eight years, the Rocky IV star said this week. The action movie actor’s doctors discovered a cancerous tumor on one of his kidneys. Although it was removed in 2015, his doctors found more tumors around the area in 2020.

After the 2015 procedure, Lundgren, 65, said on In Depth with Graham Bensinger that he had scans done every six months for five years. “In 2020, I was back in Sweden and had some kind of acid reflux or… I didn’t know what it was,” Lundgren told Bensinger. “So I did an MRI and they found there were a few more tumors around the area.”

Doctors found six more tumors in 2020. One was too large to remove, so he began systemic therapy. When Lundgren was in London the following year, doctors found more tumors. His medical team found it was “a lot worse than we thought.”

“[The doctor] kind of started talking about all these different tumors, like, in the lung and the stomach and the spine, outside the kidneys,” Lundgren explained, notes Variety. “He started saying these things like, ‘You should probably take a break and spend more time with your family,’ and so forth. 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.”

Another doctor told Lundgren his kidney cancer was mutating into lung cancer. This doctor changed the actor’s treatment to focus on lung cancer instead. If he continued along the previous treatment plan, he would only have “about three to four months left” to live, he said. Under the new treatment, his tumors shrank between 20% and 30% over three months.

Last year, Lundgren was “basically watching” his medications work. “Finally things had shrunk to about 90%. Now I’m in the process of taking out the remaining scar tissue in those tumors,” Lundgren explained. “The prognosis is that, hopefully, when they take these out, there’s no cancer activity and the medication that I’m taking is gonna suppress everything else.”

Elsewhere in his interview with Bensinger, Lundgren defended his engagement to Emma Krokdal, who is 40 years his junior. She is “very mature for her age,” he told the journalist, reports PEOPLE. Krokdal, 25, is a personal trainer who has already been married and divorced once. “I’ve been with people that are twice her age [who are] less mature than she is,” Lundgren said. The couple have been engaged since June 2020.

Lundgren is best known for playing Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. The Swedish actor reprised the role in Creed II. He also stars as King Nerus in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, opening on Dec. 20, and Gunner Jensen in The Expendables 4, which opens on Sept. 22.