The Defiance of Olivia Munn

When Olivia Munn was in the third grade, her mom approached her teacher, Mrs. Swanland, to tell her that her daughter loved her hair. Loved it so much that she often requested the same fishtail braid at home. But this was a lie: Munn hated having her hair touched, and hated braids and anything girly. The incident lodged in her memory as one of those shocking, disorienting moments where your worldview tilts on its axis.

“I knew what she was doing,” recalls Munn, who is now 45 and a mother of two. “She was trying to make the teacher like me so that I’d become a favorite. But when I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, my mom doesn’t have power.’ Because if my mom had power, she wouldn’t care if the teacher thought I was her favorite — I could just be one of the kids.”

In hindsight, Munn can see that her mother made up this flattering fib to give her a boost. A Chinese-Vietnamese refugee who fled Saigon in 1975, when she was 20, her mom was always unconsciously seeking the protection of authority figures. (This might also explain why, after divorcing her father when Munn was 6 months old, she went on to marry a tyrannical military captain.) At the time, however, the fabrication filled her with self-doubt. “Maybe it meant that I couldn’t succeed,” she recalls thinking. “Like I didn’t have it in me — without her telling this fib to my teacher — to become a favorite on my own.”

Munn and I are talking about this on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the living room of the Southern California home that she shares with her husband, comedian John Mulaney, and their two children, 3-year-old Malcom and 1-year-old Méi. She’s dressed in a flowy Dôen top-and-skirt set in a retro print, her long hair loose, feet bare. The room overlooks the ocean and the view is dazzling. Glass doors running the length of the wall stand wide open, allowing the breeze to waft into the room, which is dominated by a large playmat scattered with toys. Baby Méi naps in a nearby room, her slumber casting a serene, purposeful hush over the house. We’re sitting in low-backed armchairs by the gas fireplace, which she lit when we sat down, drinking Poppi sodas (Munn was an early investor; the company sold to Pepsi for $1.95 billion earlier this year). When I mention our similarly itinerant childhoods, we dive into a deep talk about what it’s like to slip between worlds, and how kids take on the way others see them and let it shape who they become.

“I learned that when someone says something mean to you, you try to decimate them so they don’t come back.”

We’re here to discuss Munn’s return to acting and the public eye after a five-year break. Her dark-side-of-the-suburbs AppleTV+ drama, Your Friends & Neighbors, debuted this spring and will be back for a second season early next year; her delicious turn as Sam Levitt, a jilted trophy wife who’ll do anything to hold on to her hard-won status, is a welcome reminder of how stealthy and surprising Munn can be. But the last five years have been eventful — transformative, even — and have prompted a lot of reflection about what matters and what doesn’t.

Now that she’s a parent, Munn is diligent about avoiding labels, even positive ones: “My mom used to always call me stubborn growing up, and I didn’t like that. I never liked titles.” She also tries to be mindful about telling the truth. “I never lie. If I promise I’m going to be there, I’m going to be there. If I promise we’re going to get something from the store, we get it,” she says. “The other day, I said to John, ‘You know, it’s so important for us to keep our word, because we don’t know what will become a core memory — and core memories become the subconscious of your life.”

Throughout her nearly two decades in the spotlight, from cable hottie to prestige TV player to tabloid favorite to health advocate and back again, Munn has projected an unusual and disarming blend of gorgeous and goofy, awkward and forthright. She’s established herself as a straight shooter, unapologetic and unafraid of to spar if it comes to it, which in Munn’s lifetime it regularly has. After high school, Munn attended the University of Oklahoma, where she majored in journalism, and worked at an NBC affiliate in Tulsa before moving to Los Angeles, where she took shifts as a Fox Sports sideline reporter while pursuing acting. Her big break arrived in 2006, when she won an open competition to become a co-host on G4’s Attack of the Show!, a kind of TRL for the gamer set.

This was in the heyday of the shock jock, The Man Show, and Girls Gone Wild, when raunch was king and transgression was rewarded. Munn leaned into her image as a geek-culture sex symbol: Jumping into a giant pie dressed as a French maid? Biting into a hot dog dangling from a string? All in a day’s work. “I was just really flagrant with what I’d say, what I’d do,” she says. “I was just like, ‘I’m gonna say dumb things, and I’m gonna be funny.’ There was no reason to put a cap on it. There was no reason to figure out why I was doing that. Or to want to be a different person.”

When The Daily Show hired a 29-year-old Munn as their first new female correspondent in seven years, the backlash was ferocious. The move ignited a powder train of think- and counter-think pieces grappling with whether the acclaimed show’s endorsement of the sex-pot Munn (she’d appeared on the cover of Maxim just months before) represented a step forward or a kick in the face. Had she really earned it? Did she deserve it?

“I wasn’t going to announce my retirement. I never understand actors who do that. You don’t play for the Dodgers.”

But during her time as a Daily Show regular (recently, she returned for a hilarious segment mock-defending Trump’s bonkers tariff policy), Munn carefully sharpened her persona as a misfit outsider — awkward, acerbic, and a little disoriented, with comic timing so lethal it could ambush you from behind that serene smile. All of this made her a natural choice for Aaron Sorkin, who cast her as the brilliant, blunt, socially awkward (there’s that word again) financial reporter Sloan Sabbith in The Newsroom. “I liked what Olivia was doing on The Daily Show so I asked our casting director to bring her in to read,” Sorkin tells Bustle over email. “She knocked us all out at her first audition and that was it.”

It was a trajectory-changing role. Critics praised Munn’s “excellent, strong-headed performance” as “breathtakingly good.” But it wasn’t all smooth sailing on set. Munn made news this summer when she revealed that she had beef with one of the show’s Season 1 directors, alleging that he then set out to damage her career as payback. Today, from the comfort of her living room, she tells me about butting heads with the show’s costume department, too. When the first costume designer, an older man, insisted on styling her only in the frumpiest garb, Munn remembers him telling her, “You don’t want people to judge you, to think you’re trying to flaunt anything.” And then putting her in a turtleneck and beige tights, you know, so as not to challenge anyone’s idea of what a smart woman might look like.

“Later,” Munn says, with a thread of relief, “when Hope [Hanafin] came on as designer, I explained that I actually wanted people to judge me the second I walked on screen. I wanted them to make assumptions. And then, once I started speaking Sorkin’s dialogue, to question why they’d judged me in the first place.” (Sorkin himself puts it this way: “One of the most charming things about Sloan was that she was the only one who didn’t know that she looked like Olivia Munn.”)

“I never knew how much of a neighborhood guy John was. He’s like an old-school 1950s-to-1980s guy who literally waves at everybody.”

Of course, no one knows better than Olivia Munn that, in America, it’s one thing to play a smart, outspoken woman standing on the moral high ground on TV, and quite another to exist as one in real life. A vocal advocate for the #MeToo and Stop Asian Hate movements, Munn made headlines in 2017 for calling out director Brett Ratner for sexual harassment. In 2018, she criticized director Shane Black for casting a friend of his who was a registered sex offender in a small role opposite her in The Predator without her knowledge. (His scene was cut.) In 2021, she helped identify a man who viciously attacked an Asian woman (the mother of a friend of hers) on the street. When she got together with Mulaney in 2021, shortly after his marriage had ended, the internet roared with speculation and tsk-tsking about what was “appropriate” — but of course it did. For Munn, even innocuous comments have sparked volatile discourse.

Munn is remarkably empathetic toward those responsible for the drumbeat of criticism. “When people get outraged — and this is where I understand it — they’re coming from a place of wanting people to be better to each other. That’s why social media can get so upset when they see an injustice.” Injustice riles her, too, and she sympathizes with the urge to come out swinging. “When something’s wrong, and somebody does something immoral, it becomes top priority,” she says. “But putting everything out on social media, it’s so obvious now that things will get twisted, taken out of context, misrepresented — and that creates a lot of anxiety for me.”

Munn’s fearless approach to the world was forged at home. Her mother remarried when Munn was 2, to an Air Force captain, and she suddenly found herself in a family of five children. She was the second-youngest, and it was trial by fire. “We were a rowdy group of kids. We all did martial arts. Physically, we fought a lot. I had an older brother and sister who would say the meanest things, but in a way that was sarcastic and funny. I learned a lot of humor from them. I learned to fight back. I learned to have my voice heard. I learned that when someone says something mean to you, you try to decimate them so they don’t come back. There was no idea of killing them with kindness. There was no, ‘You catch more flies with honey.’ It was like, someone comes for you? You take them down.”

Her stepfather’s military postings meant that Munn grew up moving between Oklahoma (where her beloved paternal grandparents lived) and Tokyo, and back again — twice. Adjusting to different social environments was difficult. “I was always nervous to go to a new school. I was worried about what the social dynamics would be, would the kids be nice.” To this day, cafeteria sounds — silverware on linoleum, in particular — make her anxious. At home, she grew increasingly defiant, standing up to the verbal/physical abuse of her stepfather, even threatening to tell her grandparents about his behavior. “The look on his face, I’d never seen it. He walked away, and I saw that if you speak up and attack back hard, you can take down the giant.”

“My entire childhood was survival mode. Like being on the edge of a cliff with somebody running after you.”

By the time her mother divorced him and resettled the kids in Oklahoma, at the start of Munn’s junior year in high school, she felt out of place as a half-white, half-Asian kid. “The way other people saw me — the names or labels they gave me — even if I fought back against them, they still ended up becoming part of my identity,” she says. “So, a small part of my personality became a big part of my personality — which was the personality to fight, to not give a sh*t.”

Now that she’s a parent, Munn looks back on her childhood experiences differently. Growing up with a volatile stepfather “kicked this thing up in me: the feeling that any little thing is going to be an attack. I think about that with my children. ‘The best way to parent is to remember your own childhood,’” she says, paraphrasing Mr. Rogers. It took her a long time to understand that her “stubbornness,” as her mother saw it, was actually anxiety, she says, noting that she hadn’t had a name for that feeling as a child. “As a kid, I remember thinking, ‘I’m not stubborn. I just speak up.’”

In her late 20s, Munn had an epiphany. She realized that most people experience anxiety on a scale of one to 10 in their daily lives: “One to two being, ‘I’m gonna be late for work, where are my keys?’ And ten being, ‘My entire family is burning alive in the house and I can’t get them out.’ I lived on an eight or nine my entire childhood: survival mode. Like being on the edge of a cliff with somebody running after you. When I lived my life like that, every day of my childhood, what would be 10 for people became my one or two.”

Munn tells me that a month into her tenure on The Daily Show, she assessed her life, realizing the opportunity that came with her platform, and decided to put that provocative, combative edge behind her. “And you know, for the last 15 years, I’ve really tried to be a better person and tried to stand up for what I think is right. And it’s something that I continue to do. But I’m a much calmer person now.”

Munn does seem calm — softer and more subdued than her on-screen self. In fact, as the ocean sparkles behind her, she looks a little like a character in a cool ’70s movie — maybe Shampoo. Or maybe I’ve just been influenced by all the crisply tanned older neighbors I passed on my way to her house, tootling around in their golf carts, waving. Mulaney wasn’t among them, but he apparently fits right in. “I never knew how much of a neighborhood guy John was,” Munn tells me later. “He’s like an old-school 1950s-to-1980s guy who literally waves at everybody: ‘Good morning!’ ‘Hey there!’ ‘Hey, how you doing?’”

“It was like slamming the brakes on my life. Beating cancer became my full-time job.”

Your Friends & Neighbors is set in a similarly affluent neighborhood, though perhaps not quite as friendly. It’s the story of a finance guy (Jon Hamm) who loses his job and starts burglarizing his neighbors to keep up his lifestyle. Munn plays the friend and neighbor — hey! — he starts sleeping with after both of their spouses dump them for other people. Munn steals every one of her scenes — including the show’s ending, during which she delivers one devastating line that subverts everything the show has led you to believe about her and her right to belong to such an exclusive corner of the world.

Your Friends & Neighbors was Munn’s first big part after an almost five-year hiatus following COVID, pregnancy, childbirth, and her extremely public experience fighting breast cancer. Soon after giving birth to Malcolm, Munn began to experience debilitating postpartum anxiety attacks that lasted for a year. She considered giving up acting and going behind the camera. “I think I just was tired of the business,” she says. “I got tired of being out in public. I just was, like, tired of it. So, I called my reps and told them not to put me up for anything. I wasn’t going to announce my retirement. I never understand actors who do that. You don’t play for the Dodgers.”

In February of 2023, just as she was starting to feel better, Munn got a mammogram, which came back normal. Even so, she’d scored high on the Tyrer-Cuzick risk assessment test, and her doctor recommended additional testing. An MRI revealed luminal B breast cancer in both breasts; a biopsy confirmed. Within a month of the diagnosis, Munn had a double mastectomy. During the surgery, another, tangerine-sized mass was discovered and removed. Eleven months after that, she had an oophorectomy and a hysterectomy. “It was like slamming the brakes on my life,” she says of her diagnosis. “Beating cancer became my full-time job, and once I realized there was a free test women should know about, that became my only mission.”

Méi was born via surrogate. And while Munn regrets not being able to carry her, she’s grateful for the family the experience brought into her life. On the night Méi was born, she and Mulaney had settled into an adjacent hospital room after the surrogate’s water broke. “And about an hour later, the nurse popped her head in and said, ‘It’s happening.’ We rushed in, and the baby was here. She was just ready for the world. We were all crying. The first person [John] grabbed and hugged and kissed on the cheek was her husband.” The surrogate will be celebrating Méi’s first birthday with them soon.

Ten months and five operations (including a lymph node dissection, reconstructive surgery, and a nipple delay) after her diagnosis, Munn received a call from her reps, who told her she’d received an offer. “They said that out of all of the pilots, this was in the top five that everybody wanted to do.” Munn read the script and met with the creator Jonathan Tropper. “And as soon as I did, I was like, ‘Yes.’” She’d just undergone her fourth surgery and had one more to go. “I told Jonathan Tropper, ‘I’m OK, but I’ve just gone through this.’ And he was so supportive. Everybody at Apple has been so supportive. They’ve donated to breast cancer research.”

“I don’t have time in my life to allow myself to have so much anxiety. My kids need me.”

Since then, Munn has tirelessly used her megaphone to advocate for breast cancer screenings and early detection. She’s filling me on all of it when the baby appears.

“Wait, look, this is my daughter!” Munn says, unable to resist the rested, chunky infant. “Méi Méi, come here!”

Munn tells me she recently posted a reel announcing Méi’s first word, “Mama” — only to remember she has a video of Malcolm teaching her to say “Dada,” adding, with her trademark candor: “So now I gotta be like, ‘You guys, I was wrong! Her first word was Dada!’”

“She’s very social,” Munn says, as Méi fixes me with her big blue eyes. Soon she’ll become engrossed in several toys, and then will commence going through my bag.

“Thank God, she’s a mama’s girl,” Munn says. She’d heard that sometimes being born via surrogate made it hard for some babies to recognize their mothers. “But, from the beginning, she knew me — because she’d always call out for me, and she still does.”

Munn returns to our conversation, about the parts of our lives we can control and those that we can’t. “There’s this expression that I have always hated,” she says: “Everything happens for a reason.” She finds it hollow, just another lie people tell to comfort themselves. “There are some people who die very lonely. Some people who have a drug addiction, and relapse, and die in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night. Well, what was the reason? Not everything works out.”

The real reason she doesn’t like the phrase is that it takes away one’s agency, and to Munn, agency is everything. Especially now that she’s been through hell and back health-wise. Her signature tenacity is still present but it’s less hard-edged combatant, more calmly powerful protector: “It’s a gift I’ve given myself: the gift of letting go.”

“On social media, it’s so obvious now that things will get twisted, taken out of context, misrepresented.”

Not that that’s always easy either. The hormone-suppressing medication Munn has been on since her surgeries has caused all kinds of side effects. “I went through a period where I was so exhausted. Then it made me so angry and volatile and impatient. And then it gave me anxiety. So I went back to the exhausting part, only now the exhausting medication has made me exhausted and anxious,” she says. She is trying to be mindful of where she puts her energy and not do things that could trigger her anxiety.

But does she still find herself wanting to sound off on the injustices, which seem to mushroom on the daily? “That part of me is obviously still very strong. But by focusing on doing something positive with my life, and making this my number one goal — using my platform to help women — I know that I’m not going to get anxiety from that,” she says. “I don't have time in my life to allow myself to have so much anxiety. My kids need me.”

For now, Munn is happy the show is doing so well. Happy that her friend James Marsden — older brother of the first girl to befriend her in Oklahoma, if you can believe it — will be joining the show in Season 2. Happy to be in a relationship where she feels like part of a team with the same goal. Happy that she’ll soon get to go on tour with Mulaney and the kids. Happy to be alive.

“I really want to focus on protecting the time that I have. If I was 80 years old, and I was told I could go back 40 years, I wouldn’t care about the mess. I wouldn't care about how tired I am, or about whether she’s screaming in the car seat,” she says. “I’d put myself in that moment if I'm 90 years old and all I know is that none of the bullsh*t matters.”

Top Image Credit: LA Apparel Swimsuit