Dolph Lundgren Reveals He Nearly Died During Secret Eight-Year Battle with Cancer

Dolph Lundgren is opening up about his secret battle with cancer.

In a new interview, the 65-year-old Rocky IV actor revealed for the first time that he was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2015, and at one point during his battle, he was told he only had “two to three years” left to live.

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“They found a tumor in my kidney and they took it out…but then they did a biopsy and it was cancerous,” Dolph recalled during an interview on In Depth With Graham Bensinger. “Then I did scans every six months, then you do it every year, then it was fine for about five years.”

Despite getting the tumor taken out, the cancer came back in 2020, but this time, doctors found six tumors in Dolph‘s kidneys and liver.

The growths were too big to have surgically removed, so Dolph underwent chemotherapy, which gave him some difficult side effects.

“His mouth got really sore, his hands got sore — his feet — and he couldn’t eat anything warm or anything cold, anything spicy,” Dolph‘s fiancée Emma Krokdal explained. “So that was a struggle to get food down so he kept losing weight.”

After being told that he was a “lost case,” Dolph said he started to come to terms that he was probably going to die.

“They started saying things like, ‘You should take a break and spend more time with your family,’” Dolph recalled his doctors telling him. “So I kinda asked him, ‘How long do you think I have left?’ and I think he said, ‘Two to three years’ but I could tell in his voice that it was less.”

“I thought it was it for sure,” Dolph continued. “You kind of look at your life and go ‘I’ve had a frickin’ great life.’ I’ve lived like five lifetimes in one. So it wasn’t like I was bitter about it.”

Even though his condition continued to get worse, Dolph said he refused to give up and eventually got a second opinion from Dr. Alexandra Drakaki, who made a key discovery about his case.

Dr. Drakaki found a mutation in one of Dolph‘s tumors that is commonly seen in lung cancer, which opened up more potential treatments for him.

“Within three months, things were shrinking by 20 to 30 percent,” Dolph said.

By the end of 2022, Dolph‘s tumors had shrunk by about “90 percent,” allowing him to finally have all of his remaining scar tissue surgically removed.

Now that he is doing much better, Dolph says he “appreciates life a lot more” and feels “lucky to be alive.”

“Somehow as an actor, you know, you try to put positive emotion and positive energy into the world,” Dolph shared. “I’ve always tried to be nice to everybody I meet…and maybe it came back to me somehow when I needed it the most.”