Olivia Munn appeared on CBS Sunday Morning on March 29, 2026, and described what it was like when her husband walked into her breast cancer appointments. He had a notebook with him.
The notebook was the same one he carried everywhere, the one he used to write down ideas for jokes, observations about the world, anything that came to him during the day.
At the cancer appointments, he wrote down notes about the disease, about hormone therapy, about surgery options and side effects and recovery timelines.
Somewhere in that notebook, right alongside all of it, were the comedy ideas he could not stop having.
“He had his little notebook,” Munn said on the broadcast. “You know? And he’s got his notebook that he writes all of his ideas for jokes and anything that comes to him through the day. You know, having the humor to go through it and having someone who’s so funny, it really, it just lightens everything.”
That image, the comedian with the notebook, writing cancer notes and punchlines in the same place because that is just how his brain works, is the most specific thing Munn has shared publicly about what their marriage looked like during the worst year of her life. “There’s no better person in the world to me than my husband,” she said.
Who Is John Mulaney?
John Edmund Mulaney was born August 26, 1982, in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in an Irish Catholic household and describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, a theme that runs through much of his comedy.
He attended Georgetown University and after graduating moved to New York to pursue stand-up, working briefly at Comedy Central before auditioning for Saturday Night Live.
He joined SNL’s writing staff in August 2008, one of a remarkable class of auditioners that included Donald Glover, Ellie Kemper, and Nick Kroll. He wrote for the show for four seasons and is best known among SNL work for co-creating Stefon, the eccentric New York nightlife correspondent, with Bill Hader.
He won a Primetime Emmy in 2011 for co-writing the Justin Timberlake monologue with Seth Meyers and Justin Timberlake.
When he left the writing staff in 2013, he had already been building a parallel stand-up career that would eventually make him one of the most respected comedians working.
His stand-up specials, New in Town in 2012, The Comeback Kid in 2015, Kid Gorgeous in 2018, and Baby J in 2023, established a voice that was precise, self-deprecating, rooted in specific memory, and technically clean in a way that drew comparisons to the structural comics of earlier generations.
Kid Gorgeous won him a second Emmy. Baby J, which addressed his 2020 addiction relapse and subsequent rehabilitation directly and at length, won him a third.
He has hosted SNL six times and became a member of the Five Timers Club in 2022.
His personal life in 2021 was the subject of significant public discussion. He had been married to artist Anna Marie Tendler since 2014. In December 2020, friends including Seth Meyers, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll, Fred Armisen, and Natasha Lyonne staged an intervention after Mulaney relapsed into cocaine and alcohol use during the pandemic.
Mulaney later described being two hours late to his own intervention because he stopped to get a haircut. He entered rehabilitation in December 2020 and left in February 2021.
His separation from Tendler became public in May 2021. He and Tendler’s divorce was finalized in January 2022. He has spoken about Munn and their son Malcolm as central to his recovery, saying they saved his life.
How Munn And Mulaney Got Together
They had first met in 2013 at a mutual friend’s wedding. Munn later recalled being overly enthusiastic about it. “At first, it was cool, and then I kept going up to him at the wedding like, ‘So you having fun?’ I was just so obsessed with hanging out with and talking with him,” she said in a 2015 HuffPost Live interview.
She said she later sent him an email and he never wrote back, adding drily that she probably had the wrong address.
They reconnected in the spring of 2021, shortly after Mulaney left rehabilitation, when a friend suggested he reach out to Munn as he was looking for a new apartment in New York.
Their relationship became public in May 2021. In September 2021, Mulaney announced on Late Night with Seth Meyers that Munn was pregnant.
Their son Malcolm Hiệp Mulaney was born on November 24, 2021. Mulaney introduced him to the world on Christmas Eve with a post that read, “Meet Malcolm Hiệp Mulaney. He has his whole life ahead of him. He hasn’t even tried seltzer yet. I’m very in love with him and his whole deal.”
When he hosted SNL for the fifth time in February 2022, Mulaney used his opening monologue to describe fatherhood. “Life is a lot better and happier now,” he told the audience. “I have a 12-week-old son. He is a pretty cool guy for someone who can’t vote. His legs are like little calzones, and I want to eat him.”
They married in July 2024 over Independence Day weekend in a deliberately private ceremony at a friend’s home in New York state. The only attendees were Malcolm, a witness, and their officiant, Sam Waterston, Munn’s co-star from The Newsroom.
Mulaney confirmed the marriage on Late Night with Seth Meyers in August 2024. “It’s the best,” he said. “The greatest single time of my life.”
What Cancer Was Olivia Munn Facing?
In February 2023, Munn had taken a free online questionnaire called the Lifetime Risk Assessment test, a tool that estimates a person’s lifetime risk of developing breast cancer using factors including age, family history, menstruation history, and whether they have given birth.
Her score came back at 37.3 percent. Anything above 20 percent is considered high risk.
She had tested negative for 90 cancer genes including BRCA in a genetic test just before taking the risk assessment. She had a normal mammogram. She had no symptoms.
Two months later, in April 2023, those additional screenings led to a biopsy. Doctors found Luminal B cancer in both of her breasts, a bilateral diagnosis.
Luminal B is described by oncologists as aggressive and fast-moving. She was 43 years old, had no family history of the disease, and had felt completely fine.
“I went from feeling completely fine one day, to waking up in a hospital bed after a 10-hour surgery the next,” she wrote when she publicly announced her diagnosis on Instagram in March 2024. “I’m lucky. We caught it with enough time that I had options.”
The treatment involved five surgeries in total. A double mastectomy, lymph node dissection, reconstructive surgery, a nipple delay procedure, and an oophorectomy, as well as a partial hysterectomy.
Because of the surgeries and their effects on her body, their second child, daughter Méi June Mulaney, was born via gestational surrogate on September 14, 2024. “I had so many profound emotions about not being able to carry my daughter,” Munn wrote on Instagram when announcing Méi’s birth.
“When I first met our gestational surrogate, we spoke mother to mother. She showed me so much grace and understanding, I knew I had found a real-life angel.” Méi’s name means plum in Chinese. She was born in the year of the dragon.
What Did Mulaney Do?
Munn has described her husband’s presence during her cancer treatment in multiple interviews across the past two years, and each account adds a different specific detail to the same picture. He attended every doctor’s appointment.
He drove between Cedars-Sinai and their home repeatedly, taking their son Malcolm to the park, putting him down for naps, returning to the hospital to sit with Munn, driving home to put Malcolm to bed, and coming back again.
In her Instagram post announcing her diagnosis in March 2024, Munn wrote,
“I’m so thankful to John for the nights he spent researching what every operation and medication meant and what side effects and recovery I could expect. For being there before when I went into each surgery and being there when I woke up, always placing framed photos of our little boy Malcolm so it would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes.”
To People magazine in April 2024 she said,
“It would’ve felt like climbing an iceberg without him. I don’t think he had a moment to himself, between being an incredibly hands-on father and going to and from the hospital, taking Malcolm to the park, putting him to nap, driving to Cedars-Sinai, hanging out with me, going home, putting Malcolm to bed, coming back to me.”
The CBS Sunday Morning interview on March 29 added the notebook, the image that ties together the specific way Mulaney is wired and the specific way he showed up. He did not become a different kind of person under the pressure of the situation.
He showed up as exactly who he is, notebook in hand, writing cancer information and comedy ideas in the same pages, being present and being funny because that is the same thing for him.
Where Do Things Stand?
The CBS Sunday Morning interview coincided with the return of Munn’s Apple TV+ series Your Friends and Neighbors, in which she plays a devious divorcee opposite Jon Hamm.
Season two premieres April 3, 2026. Munn has described returning to work, including filming intimate scenes she was initially nervous about due to surgical scarring, as part of her ongoing recovery.
She was named to TIME’s 2025 Women of the Year list and TIME’s 2024 100 Most Influential People in Health.
Since going public with her diagnosis, the number of women taking the Lifetime Risk Assessment test has increased by 4,000 percent. “Knowing that it’s really changed so many people’s lives,” Munn said on CBS. “It’s been the most amazing thing. There’s no way I could have ever predicted it.”
She and Mulaney have two children, Malcolm who is four and Méi who turns two this fall. Mulaney described his daughter during a December 2024 appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, noting that he and Malcolm would sometimes pull each other aside to discuss her behavior.
“Did you see what Meimei did?” he would say to his son. “She is so weird.”
The notebook is still with him on the road. Whatever is in it now, some of it almost certainly happened on a Tuesday.
