Olivia Munn on Her Surrogacy: ‘I Needed to Go This Route’

Max Mara blazer. Araks bra. Giorgio Armani sunglasses.

I’m interviewing Olivia Munn tomorrow. I texted a friend. Don’t you know her?

He texted back in seconds: We aren’t in touch now but worked/socialized back in the day. I genuinely liked her. She was smart, nice, didn’t take herself too seriously. We’d run into each other at big parties and take a breather and make fun of this person or that.

Three grey dots. Then:

If I called her tmrw (after ten years) and said, “hey, I need to sleep on your sofa” She would respond and I’d be asleep on sofa, with coffee next morning.

My friend confirmed what I’d always suspected: that Munn is kind, smart, and funny. This is what I was thinking about as I pulled up to her home the next day. She greets me at the door and preemptively apologizes for the mess. “Sorry about this,” she says, picking up a strand of spaghetti flung on a chair. “I was trying to get Malcom to eat and he wanted to see if it would stick.”

The house, which Munn shares with her husband, John Mulaney, their three-year-old son, Malcolm, and six-month-old daughter, Méi, is a disaster—but the happy kind. Blocks scattered…everywhere, a miniature soccer goal pushed next to the fireplace, a lost Converse sneaker over there, a doll made of pink yarn over here, and on the credenza: a Chanel handbag, a bunch of expensive sunglasses, framed photos, baby wipes, various plastic items with no real purpose that are absolutely crucial when you’re a new parent, and (curiously) two yellow satchels of Bananagrams. It’s a “tornado,” as Munn calls it. But one that comes from excitement and joy and chasing each other around. Games half-played because it’s time to eat; food barely touched because it’s time for a new game. The inmates are running the asylum. And the new parents couldn’t be prouder.

I drop my stuff on the dining room table and watch as Munn assembles lunch. She hustles back and forth to the kitchen, unpacking plastic containers of takeout (I mean, they’re new parents, ease up), and oh wait the napkins and what do you want to drink and I’m having a Poppi (Munn is an investor in the company) and okay great now we’re all set.

At last, lunch is ready. Grilled artichokes, Brussel sprouts, spicy corn salad, lime wedges. It’s a bright, optimistic, Southern California meal that matches the bright, optimistic, Southern California view. We settle in.

It’s been nearly 15 years since we met Olivia Munn as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Shortly thereafter, she landed her role as financial reporter Sloan Sabbith on The Newsroom—apropos for a woman with a degree in journalism—which made her feel like our funniest, smartest friend. Follow that with X-Men: Apocalypse and Munn went from being someone we could imagine knowing to an action star.

This month, her new Apple TV show Your Friends & Neighbors is out, and she will start filming its second season in just a few weeks (though when we meet, the first season hasn’t even aired yet). The series stars Munn as Sam Levitt, who has a secret affair with Jon Hamm’s Andrew “Coop” Cooper. Coop is fired from his high-profile finance job, starts stealing from his wealthy neighbors to keep up his lifestyle, chaos ensues, and get your popcorn ready.

But if you know anything about Munn’s life in recent years, it might not necessarily be her roles onscreen. Your Friends & Neighbors was actually her first time back on set in almost five years. And inevitably, as happens when two mothers sit to talk, the subject veers in one direction: “So what was it like after you had Malcolm?”

“I was operating normally, but I was feeling very depressed,” Munn says. “It kicked into high gear when I hadn’t lost the baby weight, and nothing was fitting, and I would see people on social media, people I knew had babies around the same time. I reached out to some of them. And I’m like, ‘How are you in these Valentino shorts and this crop top just running around LA and having the energy to take all these beautiful pictures?’”

That wasn’t Munn’s speed. “I didn’t even have the ability to fake it. I didn’t have the energy to fake anything they were faking.” There’s a lesson here—on what we can control, on what we can forgive. Or maybe, I suggest, it’s a lesson on letting the universe take over?

“I wish that I was given that lesson a lot earlier in life. They say by your 40s you’re just like, ‘Jesus, take the wheel,’” Munn, now 44, says with a smile. “It was devastating for me not to be able to carry [Méi]. I loved carrying my son.” But postpartum was “brutal.” The anxiety hit a month after Malcolm was born. “My eyes pop open at 4 a.m. I’m gasping for air. I get the tightness in my chest, and it’s like that all day long. It felt like the end of the world…. It was like when you watch a horror movie—the worst, scariest horror movie you can think of—that’s how my body felt,” she says. “I would have to sometimes hold John’s arm from room to room. It was physical, almost as if I had sprained my knee.”

I ask Munn how she recovered.

“I told John and my therapist, and everyone talked about medication. And I truly would have taken it, but by the time I was talking about it, I was so far gone that even if you put a pill in my hand, I wouldn’t have taken it. When the depression or the anxiety takes over you so much, it’s almost like you won’t take the things that will help you.”

She thinks for a minute and pulls her hair over one shoulder. “And I could not make any breast milk.”

“I think [that] kicked off the anxiety,” she says. “I saw—I’m telling you—three lactation coaches. I did the vitamins, the water, the heating…. It would take me all day long to fill up just one bottle.” Now she laughs. “I remember my mom was visiting. [I had left a bottle of] breast milk on the counter. I go in and I’m like, ‘Where’s the breast milk I left?’ And she goes, ‘Where was it?’ I said, ‘It was right here.’ She goes, ‘Oh, I cleaned up everything and I threw it away.’ I cried so hard. I was so mad and upset.”

“She just said, ‘Well, John threw the dog food away.’ John was like, ‘Wait, what? What are you doing?’ That just made me laugh,” Munn says.

“When you stop breastfeeding immediately, your hormones drop, and postpartum can come in like a tornado. And I didn’t clock any of that and I didn’t tell anybody about that. Then it was like I fell off a cliff, and I was just falling and falling and falling and falling. It was more difficult than going through cancer.”

Before we go on, a brief recap of Munn’s personal medical history. It’s one that she feels not only okay to share but almost duty bound to tell people. “This is a part of my life now that I do see as a gift and a focus.”

Malcolm was born in November 2021. For the next year, Munn battled postpartum anxiety. Then April 2023 happened. She was diagnosed with bilateral, multi-focal, multi-quadrant, stage 1 Luminal B breast cancer. By April 2024, she had: a nipple delay procedure, lymph node dissection, a double mastectomy, reconstructive surgery, an oophorectomy, and a partial hysterectomy, in which her uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries were removed. She had already done an egg retrieval (three, actually, over a nine-year period) and in September 2024 had Méi by surrogate. Ten months, five surgeries, two babies. Her final surgery was just weeks before Your Friends & Neighbors started filming. At the first table read, Hamm turned to Munn and opened up about his own very personal story about cancer: His mother had died of the disease when he was young, which made Munn think of her own growing family and what her diagnosis would mean for them.

“Just tell me what to do. Tell me what to do, and I’m going to tighten my shoelaces.”

“When I was diagnosed, they were telling me, ‘This is fast-moving. This is aggressive. We don’t have time. We’ve got to go now…. I was thinking immediately, Okay, I’ve got to fight and I've got to get through this. Just tell me what to do. Tell me what to do, and I’m going to tighten my shoelaces.”

Munn took on her treatment as though it was a full-time job. “And after I focus on that, the thing that comes up is, What if I don’t make it? What if it comes back? What if in three years it comes back somewhere else? Once it pops up somewhere else, it’s stage 4,” she says. “When you’re in a situation where death is on the table and you’re dealt this card…. I only thought about the people I loved.”

For a minute, we don’t say anything. We sit with the idea that sometime, not so long ago, Munn, only 43 then, felt that close to death, that it, in her words, showed up at her “front door.” Of course, everything else feels inconsequential. What else is there?

But then, from the kitchen:

“Daddy, I have to go potty.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

“He’s potty-trained,” says Munn, just ridiculously proud. “It’s so cute.”

She pulls the neckline of her sweater outward and looks down at her chest. “It’s not even that difficult to see. I bend over or turn a different way, and you can see the rippling of the implant. I don’t feel insecure about it. I look at it and think, Good, I was aggressive.” Maybe being back on set for Your Friends & Neighbors—which has its fair share of sex, by the way—helped Munn settle into her new skin. “Honestly, when I think about it, I was much more insecure in past nude scenes long before I had scars across my breasts. Now I view the scars on my body as battle wounds. I fought to be here and they’re proof of that.”

Munn’s “aggressive” approach also put her in surgical menopause. “Hot flashes, cold chills. My lashes were thinning.” Many women in menopause take estrogen to ease those symptoms. Munn can’t. “My cancer feeds on hormones, so they had to take away the hormones.” (For her hormone receptor positive breast cancer, she’s on hormone suppression therapy, which stops or slows estrogen production to stop or slow the growth of cancer cells.)

You know how they say the universe doesn’t give you more than you can handle? I get the feeling that the universe thinks very highly of Olivia Munn. She’s just very matter-of-fact about it all, like she’s reporting the story of her own physiology. Self-pity would be a nuisance. Another thing to clean up. Munn seems so committed to fighting that she doesn’t have time to complain.

“Hang on a second.” She jumps up and returns a minute later with a silent, bleary-eyed 20-pound smoosh ball. “This is Méi.” I’m not a baby person—even when I had my own babies, I was not a baby person (I know, not a great look). But squishy, smooshy baby Méi in her little cotton floral dress and matching bloomers is 80% thighs and incredibly cute. Munn places her in my arms and there she stays. Okay, so we’re doing this. And then I understood why. This baby is like an ad for babies. No crying or fussing or squirming. Just chill.

“Do you think you’ll tell her that you had a surrogate?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, the surrogate’s still in our life,” says Munn. “She was a better pregnant woman than I ever could have been.”

“I needed [her] to understand that I needed to go this route…. I needed her to understand this would be hard for me.”

Munn and Mulaney found their surrogate through an agency. “First of all, she doesn’t know any celebrities,” says Munn, who only cared about one thing: “Above everything else, I just wanted her to be kind.” They chose a woman in Massachusetts. “She’s an incredible mother, an incredible human being, an incredible friend, just wonderful,” Munn says. “I needed [her] to understand that I needed to go this route. It wasn’t for superficial reasons or because I wanted to put my work first. I’m not saying that any of those reasons aren’t valid for those people. And I’m not judging anyone who makes those decisions based on that, but I needed her to understand this would be hard for me.”

She pauses for a beat and looks out at the ocean. Then she’s back.

“It makes me emotional—it’s your baby, and the baby is somewhere else in the world.” Baby Méi ignores us and focuses on my hand, trying to make sense of my fingers.

Munn and Mulaney were in the delivery room when Méi was born. “The first person John hugged was the husband, he gave him a big kiss on the cheek…. It was just wonderful.”

All good, right? New baby, full nest, technically cancer-free. (“Although my doctors don’t use that term,” she says, “because we are still in a diligent fight for the next five years battling any cancer cells that are still in my body—which is a high likelihood.”) This seemed like a great time to be rounding in on the happy ending. Except.

“I felt like I had one hand on a door with a monster trying to break in, and I was just holding it there the whole time…. Just at any second, it’s going to burst through.”

“I really tested John’s patience,” she says. “And thank God he’s the most patient person and can really take a lot.” A side effect of her estrogen-zapping cancer medication was making her feel like a person she didn’t recognize. “I felt like I had one hand on a door with a monster trying to break in, and I was just holding it there the whole time…. Just at any second, it’s going to burst through.”

On the flight back to California after Méi was born, “I grabbed hold of John, and for the first time, explained the monster behind the door. I explained that I don’t like being this way. I have to be on this medicine to keep my life safe, but I’m so out of my own body and I feel like I don’t have any control over this. I broke down crying, saying, ‘I need help.’ And he just said, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to your oncologist. We’re going to figure this out….’ We tried two more medications and now we’re on one that thankfully is working.”

You know how there are people who say “we” to signify they’re one, like saying “we’re pregnant,” and you throw up a little in your mouth? That’s not what’s going on here. Throughout Munn’s—what do you call postpartum anxiety, plus cancer, plus five surgeries?—well, whatever it is, she and Mulaney were in it together as much as two people could be. When she says things like “we tried two more medications,” it’s not an affectation. You get the sense that it was all happening to both of them together.

It’s late afternoon. The sun droops in the sky, reminding us we’re not quite out of winter. Munn wants to go down to the beach. “It’s cold, I’ll grab you a jacket.” She takes the baby to the nursery and comes back in a minute with coats, handing me a black Loewe puffer. I put it on—tissues in one pocket, a toy in the other. It’s like Munn’s entire life has been captured in high-end Spanish outerwear: something for the baby, something for being human, and all of it wrapped up in Hollywood glamour. Loewe puffer as a metaphor for her life.

We make our way outside and down 50? 70? 130? steps to the semiprivate beach. We walk to the far end, to a totally deserted lagoon covered in the silvery purple mussel shells.

I ask Munn if she feels like it’s her duty to tell her story, to protect other women. (She took an online early detection test using the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool, also called the Gail Model, and wants all women to know about it.) Absolutely, she says. She didn’t ask to be put in this position, but as long as people are listening, she’s going to use her power for good.

“Nobody could predict what was going to happen in my life. No one could have protected me from it, either. I had to do it myself,” she says, staring out at the Pacific, wrapped in one of those extra-long coats that looks like a sleeping bag.

It’s late now. Munn and I both have kids to go back to. We head up to her house.

“It’s like if you’re drowning, you’re not thinking about anything from the past,” she says as we begin our climb back up the steps. “First, head above water. Second, get back to shore. Third, find my loved ones.” We pause on a landing. A few people turn to look at Munn but she doesn’t notice. “That’s all I could think about. So when I got to a place in all my treatment where I felt like I could say, ‘Okay, I passed a lot of big hurdles,’ [I realized] I was actually happier because I got through it.”

We climb up the last flight of steps and stop on the sidewalk. She grabs my arm and looks at me. I’m waiting for a piece of wisdom. A life lesson from this tireless, thoughtful, indestructible woman. And she starts laughing.

“Oh my God, how happy are you that we’re up at the top of the stairs?”

Photographer: James Emmerman
Wardrobe styling: Kat Typaldos
Hair: Bok-Hee Meixner
Makeup: Archangela Chelsea
Manicurist: Kim Truong

Originally Appeared on Self