One of Macdonald’s oldest friends, comedian Harland Williams, reveal in the film via interview clips that the comic quietly battled stomach cancer in the 1980s. In 2013, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and only told his family, agent and ex-wife, choosing to hide it from the public and even his closest friends. He was prescribed dexamethasone, causing him to gain considerable weight. “I was always taught that the nature of art was to conceal, not to reveal. What they do now is ‘confessional comedy,’ but when people confess things and they’re told how brave they are, because they have cancer or something and they talk about it, well, everyone has cancer. It’s not rare at all. The brave thing to do if you have cancer is to not talk about it,” Macdonald says in the doc.
He was inspired to keep his cancer private by Richard Farnsworth, the journeyman actor who, after battling terminal cancer in secret, took his own life with a gun in October of 2000. “I remember Richard Farnsworth was an old character actor and he did a David Lynch movie called ‘The Straight Story.’ It was based on a guy who, in actual real life, drove his riding lawnmower across the state to visit his brother, who was dying. It was Richard Farnsworth’s last movie,” Macdonald explains. “He was very frail, riddled with cancer. So anyways, the point of it is, Richard Farnsworth was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie, and if he’d said he was filled with cancer, he would’ve won, for sure. But instead, he didn’t say it. In fact, no one knew it; he kept it from everyone. He didn’t want to cause people distress, so I thought, ‘Wow, how incredible to go through it alone.’”
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