Tim Allen Reveals Cancer Scare

Tim Allen is opening up about the skin cancer diagnosis he said was “missed five times” by doctors.

The 72-year-old Shifting Gears star looked back on the cancer scare during a Jan. 5 appearance on Bill Maher’s Club Random Podcast, revealing that it was a makeup artist at the TODAY show who ultimately pushed him to pursue a diagnosis after seeing a troubling spot on his nose multiple times.

“The lady at the TODAY show noticed it,” Allen revealed on the podcast. “This is [over] two years — I did [The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon], and then I did the TODAY show. And she goes, ‘I see you haven’t done anything yet.’”

While Allen said he was originally confident in his “very prominent Beverly Hills dermatologist,” he did bring up the spot on his nose just to be safe.

“Finally, I said, ‘Hey, doc, would you take a look at this thing on my nose?’” Allen recalled, admitting that he knew he was in trouble when the doctor told him to “hold on a minute” before putting on his glasses “for the first time in 30 years” of seeing him.

“Then he looks at my nose, and he goes, “Oh s—, s—. Janice, get Paul in here, and my lawyer,’” Allen claimed, adding that the doctor them admitted to having “screwed up” and missed a skin cancer lesion on the Home Improvement star that he alleged was “missed five times.”

Allen then went to another doctor to have the skin cancer removed — but the surgery was more invasive than he initially thought.

“He goes, ‘I’m going to have to cut most of your nose off.’ He said it like that,” Allen recalled. “And I go, ‘Let me explain what I do for a living. Unless I’m gonna do a Blazing Saddles with the guy with the silver nose, you have to leave some of my f—king nose on so I can do comedy without doing 20 minutes on having no nose!’”

Allen didn’t specify when he underwent surgery to remove the skin cancer, but Maher noted that he wasn’t able to see any evidence of the procedure or the lesion. “It all worked out,” said the Last Man Standing actor. “The surgeon was good.”

Allen’s ABC sitcom Shifting Gears, which stars the Toy Story actor opposite Kat Dennings as a recently-reunited father-daughter duo, just wrapped its second season earlier this month. The network has yet to renew the series for a third season.