Inside Olivia Munn's Private World with John Mulaney, Healing from Cancer and Why She Almost Quit Acting (Exclusive)

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Olivia Munn opens up about her life with husband John Mulaney and their two kids Malcolm, 3, and Méi, 8 months, in PEOPLE's latest cover story
The actress also reflects on her life-changing two years in which she battled breast cancer and welcomed Méi via surrogate
After making a decision to quit acting, Munn reveals why she knew she had to be a part of the Apple TV+ hit Your Friends & Neighbors After two decades of acting, Olivia Munn finds that her toughest negotiations these days are with her 3-year-old son Malcolm.
On the morning of her PEOPLE cover shoot in Orange County, Calif., in May, she had to tell him mid-tantrum that later in the day he'd come to set and a big party would be waiting for him, complete with his requests for balloons, cotton candy and a birthday cake and candles (his birthday is in November).
'This is a survival technique,' Munn explains prior to Malcolm's arrival. 'I guess we'll sing 'Happy Birthday' to him. Although he's 3, so I have no idea what's going to set him off. Any parent out there doing whatever they have to do to get through the day has my utmost respect.'
Jokes aside, it would take more than a toddler tantrum for Munn, 44, to falter. After going through postpartum anxiety following Malcolm's birth and enduring multiple surgeries and treatments since her breast cancer diagnosis in April 2023, the Oklahoma-born actress — whose husband, comedian John Mulaney, and their daughter Méi, 8 months, were also present at the shoot — takes every parenting win and misstep in stride.
"Just yesterday John was trying to discipline Malcolm, and I'm just laughing, tears are coming out of my eyes,' she says. 'Everything is funny and light and airy to me now, like 95 percent of the time, because it was so much to handle back-to-back.'
Two years after her cancer diagnosis, 'it's so crazy to think that I'm sitting here with two amazing babies,' says Munn, who welcomed Méi via surrogate last September, amid her cancer treatment. 'I'm just so happy and grateful, and I'm really proud of what I've been able to do. I didn't know how much strength I had inside me.'
Making things even sweeter is her career resurgence: The Newsroom alum currently stars in the buzzy Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors. Munn plays Sam Levitt, a soon-to-be divorcée who has a complicated sexual relationship with a friend's ex, Jon Hamm's Andrew 'Coop' Cooper. In the finale that aired on May 29, Munn stole the show as her character revealed her true involvement in her estranged husband's death.
Before she took the role, Munn says, she'd made a 'strong decision' to quit acting to focus on her health and her growing household.
"I love acting, but John loves performing more. Nothing I had worked on in the past five or six years felt like it was worth me taking time away from my family,' she says. 'I started thinking for the first time that maybe I need to be behind the camera, not that that's not also hard work, but putting myself in front of the camera felt a lot more vulnerable. I wanted to protect myself."She changed her mind when her agent sent her the Your Friends & Neighbors script and told her about the team involved.
'It was the thing I needed to energize me,' she says. 'When I told John I was taking it, he was just so happy. I had one more surgery to do, and by that point we knew that Méi was on her way. I just felt like I was ready to let go of the fears and worries that I had.'
Mulaney, 42, knew that when the right project came along, Munn would want to 'dive back in' to acting.
'For the past three years Liv was just giving everything she had to her health and to being the brightest and silliest mom and partner,' he says. 'But I have to admit — and I've never said this to her — I didn't think she was done acting by any means.'
Mulaney remembers Munn first told him about the part of Sam while they were staying in a hotel room with Malcolm, as their home was being sprayed for moths.
"She was sitting on the bed and just lit up when she told me about this role," he says. "Then Malcolm and I and then Méi Méi got the chance to see our Olivia just expand and give her whole mind and heart to us and to doing this show: to see her come back from such a long break, to watch her prepare for this role while still in the middle of exhausting cancer treatment, and then like everyone else to watch week after week as she crafts this totally original, really funny, really staggering character in Sam … I'm just blown away."
Since April, Munn has been filming season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors in New York, while Mulaney has stayed with the kids at home in Orange County, about an hour outside Los Angeles, where he's spent the past several months taping his live Netflix variety talk show Everybody's Live.
Munn flies back and forth every two days when her schedule allows, and she never goes more than two weeks away from the family.
'It's a dance right now with our schedules,' Munn says. 'We make it work simply because we have the mindset that it's a blessing.'
From the start of their relationship, Munn and Mulaney have been accustomed to flying by the seat of their pants. Years after they first met at Seth Meyers' wedding in 2013, the two reconnected and began dating in spring 2021, amid Mulaney's early sobriety following a stay in rehab for alcohol and cocaine addiction.
That November they welcomed Malcolm.
'I really had no idea what kind of a father he would be, what kind of a friend he would be to me ... but the day Malcolm was born, John's whole world just lit up,' Munn says. 'Somebody once said to me, 'The first child will look like whichever parent needed them the most.' And Malcolm looks just like John. Not to be too saccharine, but looking at John looking at Malcolm, I could see all that healing happening.'
Munn, meanwhile, started experiencing severe postpartum anxiety about a month after Malcolm's birth. Around December 2022 her symptoms 'lifted,' she says, but her relief didn't last long. Four months later she learned that she has luminal B, a fast-moving and aggressive breast cancer influenced by hormones, in both breasts.
After a clear mammogram and testing negative for the BRCA cancer gene, Munn was diagnosed only after an MRI — which her ob-gyn ordered after determining she was high-risk for breast cancer using the free online Tyrer-Cuzick risk assessment tool — discovered a spot in her right breast.
An ultrasound and several biopsies confirmed bilateral cancer.
'It was a whole other perspective, because I had been struggling with life in postpartum, and now I was so desperate to stay alive,' she says. 'From the moment I received my diagnosis, it just became a march forward.'
Munn had to pull out of an action movie she was scheduled to film in Germany a week after she got her diagnosis, and she questioned whether she and Mulaney — whom she married in July 2024 — could have another child.
'What happens if I can't carry?' Munn recalls thinking. 'There were all these unknowns, but I knew where I wanted to go: alive on the other side, healthy, energetic, with a baby on the way.'
After a lymph node dissection, a nipple delay procedure and a double mastectomy, Munn had 'a window' where she could do an egg retrieval before being sent into surgical menopause from having her uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries removed in a hysterectomy with oophorectomy.
'It was important to do it at that moment, but it was also scary because my type of cancer feeds on hormones, and there are a lot of hormone injections with IVF,' says Munn, who later had reconstructive surgery.
Munn's doctor put her on a special IVF protocol for cancer patients and was able to retrieve seven eggs (at Munn's age, about one in 10 eggs is healthy). After the eggs were fertilized, two of the embryos were 'strong enough to be tested for abnormalities and the gender,' says Munn, whose heart, along with Mulaney's, was set on a baby girl.
"I remember I was on a walk with John, and I said, 'I really don't think that I'll be okay unless we get two girl embryos. I know this puts me at risk, but I just need you to support me,'" Munn recalls. "He said, 'Whatever you need.'"
That same day, Munn's doctor called and told her they had two healthy female embryos.
"That was a sign for me everything was going to be okay,' says Munn, who began the process of finding a surrogate.
'The first thing I worried about was if I would be able to find somebody who would love and take care of my daughter as much as I would,' she says. 'We were so lucky to find someone so kind who we bonded with so much.'
At present, Munn is savoring every moment of this life she could only dream of during her initial cancer treatment, which remains a 'constant dance with my oncologist.'
Munn beamed upon her kids' arrival to set, and her attitude was consistent whether she was taking a pause to feed Méi a bottle or to light Malcolm's impromptu birthday candles over and over again for him to keep blowing out.
'I'm so grateful to be on the other side. Everything feels easy in a way,' Munn says. 'I feel so at peace. If I can stay happy and healthy, then I just want to sail into the rest of my life.'
Your Friends and Neighbors is streaming now on Apple TV+.
Read the original article on People