Watch Shannen Doherty Get Emotional in First Televised Interview Since Stage 4 Diagnosis: ‘I Want It to Be Real’

This week, Shannen Doherty revealed that she has been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, sharing the news in an interview with ABC News in an emotional interview. Speaking to Amy Robach on Tuesday’s Nightline, Doherty opened up about her diagnosis, which she revealed nearly three years after announcing that she had gone into remission after her initial breast cancer diagnosis in 2015.

“I don’t think that I’ve processed it,” she said. “[People] look at you like you’re dead man walking, basically. And that they need to say their goodbyes to you, or something. Honestly, work dries up. I enjoy working and working gives me another reason to wake up every morning, it’s another reason to fight to stay alive.”

“It’s a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways,” she added. “I definitely have days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me? Who else besides me deserves this?’ None of us do.”

The 48-year-old explained that she decided to make her diagnosis public due to the fact that legal documents that mention her cancer will soon be made public as a result of her current lawsuit against State Farm.

“I’d rather people hear it from me,” she said. “I don’t want it to be twisted; I don’t want it to be a court document. I want it to be real and authentic and I want to control the narrative. I want people to know from me.”

The actress shared that the one person who knew about her diagnosis was co-star Brian Austin Green, who helped her get through the long days of filming the Beverly Hills 90210 reboot.

“I had moments of great anxiety where I thought, ‘I can’t really do this,’ and Brian was the one person who — of that group of people that knew — that I told, like, pretty quickly and said, ‘Here, the — this is what I’m dealing with,’” she said. “So prior to shooting he would always call me and say, ‘Listen, you know, whatever happens, I have your back.’ He would look at me and be like, ‘We got this, kiddo’… so Brian helped me through a lot.”

The filming of 90210 also took place shortly after the March 2019 death of original series star Luke Perry, and Doherty shared that one of the reasons she decided to do the reboot was to pay tribute to Perry.

“It’s so weird for me to be diagnosed and then somebody who was, you know, seemingly healthy to go first,” she reflected. “It was really, like, shocking. And the least I could do to honor him was to do that show. I still haven’t done, in my opinion. So it’s a hard one.”

“One of the reasons, along with Luke that I did ‘90210’ and didn’t really tell anybody because I thought, people can look at that other people with stage four can work too,” Doherty explained. “Like, you know, our life doesn’t end the minute we get that diagnosis. We still have some living to do.”

Photo Credit: ABC News