HBO Star Reveals She’ll Be on Medication for Life Following Cancer Diagnosis

Industry star Marisa Abela is opening up about her health after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2020.

The British actress, who is now in remission after receiving her diagnosis at age 23, told The Sunday Times in an interview published Sunday that while she was “all in the clear now,” she would need to take medication for the rest of her life.

“I don’t have a working thyroid so these pills sort of create one,” said Abela, now 29. “I’m never going to miss those appointments. The thyroid is all to do with your hormones, and staying on top of your hormones, as a woman, to make sure things are running as they should, is important.”

After her diagnosis, Abela underwent an eight-hour surgery and radioactive iodine treatment, which she recalled in an October 2024 interview with The Times of London.

“It is mental. A sort of nuclear physicist in an astronaut suit gives you this box and you unscrew the box and tip it up and this pulsating neon tablet goes into you — like something from the opening of The Simpsons,” she told the publication at the time. “And then this man, standing on the other side of the room, points a sort of gun thing at you to see how nuclear you are and it goes like, ‘Bbbbrrrrrrr’ and he’s like, ‘Yup, good to go,’ and he runs out of the room. And you’re just left there thinking, ‘This is in my body. How has someone just given this to me?’”

Recovering from the surgery was a shocking experience for Abela, who remembered seeing herself in the mirror for the first time and thinking, “‘That’s it, my career is over,’ because [my neck] was stapled, bloody.”

“It wasn’t pretty at all and the scar is big,” she continued. “[I couldn’t] imagine ever playing a character where her description isn’t, ‘And she has this big scar on her neck.’”

Abela also noted that the thyroid cancer diagnosis had created a “distrust within your body that I really wouldn’t wish on anyone,” explaining, “This thing existed inside me for years without me knowing it was there — and that has changed my relationship with my body. I’m really not an ‘everything happens for a reason’ kind of person, and I don’t think that should happen to anyone, but I think that it does mean that you have a real perspective on what is important and what’s not.”