Olivia Munn said the best advice she got from Shannen Doherty during her cancer battle was to be as assertive as possible.
Munn and Doherty developed a close relationship just months before the “Beverly Hills, 90210” actress passed away from her own long battle with breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones and brain.
“She said to me having gone through this … she said just be so aggressive,” Munn told the audience during Los Angeles Magazine’s The L.A. Woman Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel Friday.
The “Your Friends and Neighbors” actress added that she knows she’s lucky because she had the “opportunity to fight” when so many women don’t.
“I don’t look at cancer like, ‘I can’t believe I went through this, it’s really unfair.’ There’s no place in my mind and my energy to think about how things are unfair,” she said in conversation with the magazine’s editor Jasmin Rosemberg. “I just think thank God I’m one of the lucky ones.”
During the luncheon, where Munn, 45, was honored as Woman of The Year, she detailed her breast cancer journey and urged women to take the Tyrer-Cuzick breast cancer risk assessment test, a tool that helps calculate a woman’s 5-year and lifetime risk of developing the disease.
She recalled having a clear mammogram and ultrasound, which is commonly given to women with dense breasts, in January 2023, as well as a zero percent on her genetic mutation test. However, her risk assessment test came back at 37.3 percent (anything above 20 percent is considered high risk).
She went to get an MRI just months later in April and learned she had Luminal B breast cancer, a fast-moving form of cancer, in both breasts.
Munn underwent five surgeries during her treatment, including a lymph node dissection, nipple delay, a double mastectomy and reconstruction, a oophorectomy (to have her ovaries removed) and a partial hysterectomy. She finished her surgeries in April 2025.
“I used to be really tough and I felt like any fight that came my way I would take it. I would not shy away from confrontation,” she told the crowd, which included Jennie Garth, Corinne Foxx, Jane Seymour and her close friend, Jessica St. Clair.
“What I realized since having cancer is that, I have this armor on,” she continued. “I think a lot of women, we need to protect ourselves with this big heavy armor and I looked at this mountain that I had to climb and I was like, I cannot climb a mountain this high holding all this extra weight, so I had to drop it.”
She said when she got to the other side, she realized, “I’m so much stronger the more vulnerable I am and I’m able to carry that with me every day.”
The “Newsroom” star concluded, “We really don’t know our courage and bravery until it’s put to test and now I know that I have it in me. I know I can take on anything.”
Munn — who shares two children, Malcolm, 4, and Méi, 1, with husband John Mulaney — is currently working with Sen. Mark Kelly to try and get something passed to include the lifetime risk assessment test as standard care for every woman.
“I don’t feel that it’s fair for women to always have to know about the things they need to ask their doctors to do,” she said.
Munn previously thanked Doherty for helping her through her battle during Hollywood Creative Alliance’s Astra TV Awards in June 2025.
When Doherty died in July 2024, Munn mourned the loss of her friend, writing on social media, “Just a couple of months ago, she asked how I was doing and if she could do anything for me. True to form, Shannen was offering me her support even though she was in the final stage of fighting this horrific disease.”
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