Steve McQueen shares cancer diagnosis, says he's "fully recovered" after surgery

Acclaimed director Steve McQueen shared both his prostate cancer diagnosis and fully clean bill of health on the same day. In a new interview with Deadline, the filmmaker revealed that he had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor two years ago, which delayed the production of his World War II epic Blitz by two weeks. At the time, he returned to work without telling any of the cast and crew the reason for his absence because he didn’t want any of them to be “concerned” and distracted from the filmmaking process. “And that was it. I really just wanted to get on with the job. And that’s kind of like who I am. I’m a ‘get on with it’ kind of person,” he told the outlet of his decision to keep the diagnosis private.

Luckily, he’s now “fully recovered and fully functional” (“and that includes downstairs,” he quipped), which he attributes almost entirely to the importance of early detection. “Early detection means virtually a hundred percent success rate. Again, it’s a cancer that if you detect early, it’s totally survivable,” he shared. McQueen’s father died of the same disease in 2006, so the director knew there was a good chance he would inherit it as well. That led to a number of routine scans and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) checks, one of which caught the tumor as early as it did. “In some ways, you could say, my dad saved my life because unfortunately he died of it,” McQueen shared.

McQueen is divulging his experience now after all this time in advance of a speech he’s set to give at the UK House Of Commons this afternoon. In the speech, he’ll launch a new campaign for the organization Prostate Cancer Research. This specific form of cancer disproportionately affects Black men, which added to McQueen’s desire to speak out. According to statistics shared by the organization, one in eight men will get prostate cancer, but “one in four Black men will get prostate cancer, and one in twelve Black men will die of prostate cancer,” he said. “So for me, it was about preempting it. The fact that I was preempting the situation for years was, again, my savior in that way.” 

McQueen hopes that by using his platform, other men like him won’t be “left to their own devices to navigate this on their own.” “The tragedy of this is no one has to die of it,” he concluded. “That’s the tragedy.”