Dolph Lundgren's Life-Saving Medical Revelation: What Really Happened?
Standing at a staggering 6-foot-4 with an infamous statuesque build and steely stare, Dolph Lundgren has long been one of Hollywood’s leading macho men — but even strength is no armor against life’s most unexpected blows.
Lundgren, 68, was dealt one of his own in 2015, when doctors discovered a tumor that led to a kidney cancer diagnosis.
“Getting a second opinion, that saved my life,” Dolph exclusively told Us about discovering he had been receiving the wrong cancer treatment for years. “I was misdiagnosed [and] had I not sent all my charts and everything to [the] doctor at UCLA, I wouldn’t have been sitting here right now.”
By then, Lungren’s cancer had already taken a devastating toll on his body, with tumors sprouting in his lungs, spine, stomach and liver as his initial cocktail of medications failed to keep the cancer at bay. After discovering there was another course of action, the revelation took some time for the actor to process, but it soon gave way to hope.
“It was both [disbelief and relief],” Lundgren said. “Disbelief first, and then we started the second treatment, the new treatment, [and] it was a relief that it started working quite quickly.”
The Rocky IV star admitted he was “a little upset” after learning what had happened and says he and his wife Emma Krokdal even thought about pursuing a malpractice case and donating the proceeds to charity before ultimately deciding not to go through with it.
“I decided it [was] going to be a mess,” he told Us. “Who needs it? I was still going through treatment, and then I realized that they weren’t doing it out of spite; they just had made a mistake. People make mistakes.”
Amid the uncertainty, Lundgren kept filming during what he now calls the “worst part” of his illness. While working on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Expend4bles, the actor quietly kept his diagnosis to himself, crediting his wife, 30, with helping him manage his health once the cameras stopped rolling.
“[Emma] was there and helped me with the treatments, with my diet because I could only eat certain things. I had sores in my mouth and so forth,” he said. “She was just fantastic. So without her, it would have been very, very difficult, I think, to pull through.”
After nearly a decade-long fight for answers, Lundgren says he has regained much of the strength he had before his health took a turn — now with a new outlook on life.
“Actually, I'm kind of back to where I was before I started, without the crazy burning the candle at both ends sort [of] attitude, which I've had since I was young. But I gave that up,” he told Us.
While he still undergoes scans every four to five months, the action star says things have remained “clean” for roughly three years. “Obviously I'm aware of the fact that psychologically that something could come back,” Lundgren said, candidly revealing he is aware that further treatment might be necessary to keep the cancer from returning. “And look, it's just part of life. I can't change that.”
Coming out the other side as a cancer survivor has given the actor a chance to look back at just how much his life changed, something he does candidly in his new documentary Dolph: Unbreakable, available on digital platforms October 6.
“I do feel that it was a blessing for me,” he said. “If it had not happened, I would have pushed too hard somewhere, and some other kind of catastrophic breakdown physically, maybe because I was just doing too much.”
The project was already underway before his health became a bigger part of the story, prompting Lundgren to rethink the film's focus as his circumstances changed. “Doing a documentary or writing a book, it's going back down memory lane, and you're revisiting your past, your decisions, why you did certain things,” he said. “It's sort of therapeutic.”
The film takes viewers back to Lundgren’s childhood stomping grounds in Sweden, his early fascination with martial arts, and even his mid-80s whirlwind relationship with actress Grace Jones, before tracing the Hollywood career that followed. Along the way, longtime friends and fellow action heavyweights Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger make a cameo, offering their own perspective on the notorious tough guy.
By sharing the harder chapters alongside the highlights, Lundgren says he hopes his story can offer some encouragement to anyone facing a fight of their own. “I hope there’s some inspiration there,” he told Us. “I hope people can see that there’s a way to make it through hard times if you really want to, if you have the right attitude.”
After coming so close to losing the future he once took for granted, Lundgren says he isn’t trying to outrun time anymore — he’s savoring the fact that he has it.
“I just want to enjoy every day,” he said. “Every day, I look at the sky. I look at the sunrise and realize I'm here in this beautiful world and with plenty of possibilities and all these people around me that I love, that led me back, and what the hell? Well, I got nothing to complain about.”
