NEED TO KNOW
While shooting her campaign for SKIMS last October, Olivia Munn decided she didn’t “want to be insecure about” her surgical scars anymore
Munn was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 2023 and went on to have a double mastectomy, nipple delay procedure, a lymph node dissection, reconstructive surgery and hysterectomy with oophorectomy
Munn now sees her scars as proof “that I battled and won”
While on set for her SKIMS campaign shoot last October, Olivia Munn had a revelation.
As her makeup artist touched up her scars, Munn — who had a double mastectomy, nipple delay procedure, a lymph node dissection, reconstructive surgery and hysterectomy with oophorectomy following her breast cancer diagnosis in April 2023 — says she looked in the mirror and started thinking about “how insecure” they’d made her.
“I just thought, ‘You know what? I am done. I don’t want to be insecure about this anymore. I’m going to carry this for the rest of my life,’ ” Munn tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story, on newsstands Friday. “I’m like, ‘Man, having these scars means that I battled and won. This is just proof of how hard I fought. This is proof that I’m still here.’ “
Munn, 44, says she then called the SKIMS team into her dressing room and asked them if it’d be possible to highlight her scars in the shoot.
“I said, ‘Look, if there are other women out there who have this same scar and see me with it and feel comforted, then it will heal me just as much as it may help them,’ ” she recalls. “We got out there, and we did it. It was in that moment that I felt like an armor came off. I was holding this shield that I didn’t realize was so heavy.”
Vanessa Beecroft for SKIMS
Olivia Munn for SKIMS
Since the campaign’s release, Munn says she’s had “so many impactful moments from people coming up to me and saying they feel better about their scars.”
“The day after the campaign was released, there was this guy who was maybe 19 or 20, and he stopped me and he said that it meant so much to him and his mother,” she says. “He said his mother had gone through breast cancer and his mom’s scars always made him feel like this tinge of sadness and fear. He was like, ‘But now I see my mom’s scars very differently.’ The fact that he’s now looking at his mother and her scars as something that’s triumphant instead of something that’s sad really meant a lot to me, and it’s something I think about often.”
Prior to her surgeries, Munn says she didn’t expect her scars “to be as significant as they are.”
“The scars go from the sides and all the way around, and there’s some tumors that had to be dug out,” says Munn. “So, I had a lot of insecurity about it.”
RYAN WEST
Olivia Munn photographed on May 19
Because of her scars, Munn — who married husband John Mulaney, 42, in 2024 — initially had some fears as she prepared to film intimate scenes with Jon Hamm for Apple TV+’s Your Friends & Neighbors.
“My husband thinks every part about me is beautiful, which is such a great feeling, but I was going to be showing myself to somebody who’s not my husband, and I thought, ‘Will there be any quiet judgment?’ ” Munn says.
Apple+
Jon Hamm and Olivia Munn in ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’
But Munn says Hamm quickly put her at ease.
“Jon is amazing and lovely,” she says. “After I first talked about my diagnosis, he sat down and talked with me about it and opened up about people in his life who have gone through cancer and was just really compassionate and loving and warm. He made me feel really safe.”
Read the original article on People
