British Screenwriter Steve McQueen ‘Fully Recovered’ 2 Years After Cancer Diagnosis

Steve McQueen speaks to the media as he attends the "Occupied City" special presentation during the 67th BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 05, 2023. Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for BFI

British film director Steve McQueen underscored the importance of early cancer screenings two years after overcoming his own battle with prostate cancer.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker revealed in a recent interview with Deadline that he was diagnosed with the disease in 2022, shortly before filming began for his most recent movie, “Blitz.”

McQueen, 55, promptly underwent surgery to remove the tumor.

“[Doctors] discovered that I had developed this cancer, this tumor, a small tumor, and therefore obviously caught it very, very, early. I delayed the shoot by two weeks and then had the procedure,” he told the publication on Nov. 14—two years to the day of the operation.

“Blitz,” a historical war drama starring Saoirse Ronan, Elliot Heffernan, and Harris Dickinson, premiered in select theaters across the United States and UK earlier this month. The film, set in London during World War II, will stream globally via Apple TV+ on Nov. 22.

According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer arises when cells within the male reproductive gland begin to grow out of control.

Aside from skin cancer, the disease is the most common type of cancer in males. It is estimated that about one out of every eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their life, with approximately one in 44 succumbing to the disease.

However, a man’s susceptibility to prostate cancer can vary greatly depending on a variety of factors, such as his age. Those under 40 years of age are less likely to develop the disease, with about 60 percent of prostate cancer diagnoses occurring in men aged 65 and older.

Race can also play a factor in the prevalence of the disease.

“One in four Black men will get prostate cancer, and one in 12 Black men will die of prostate cancer,” McQueen noted.

McQueen’s statistics parallel 2015 findings published in the open-access medical journal BMC Medicine, which documented the occurrence of prostate cancer among men living in England, where the screenwriter is from.

Early Cancer Screenings

In 2021, the director of “12 Years a Slave” released a short film titled “Embarrassed“ as part of a male cancer awareness campaign.

The nearly two-minute-long public service announcement—starring Morgan Freeman, Idris Elba, Micheal Ward, and Chiwetel Ejiofor—sought to encourage black men to undergo early screenings for prostate cancer.

McQueen told the London Standard in December of that year that the video was a “passion project” inspired by the death of his father, Philbert McQueen, who lost his life to prostate cancer in 2006.

“He was 67. And ... if he had been diagnosed earlier, he would have been more likely to survive,” the director said.

“There’s a 98 percent success rate if you catch it early. So it’s upsetting that we didn’t have this knowledge, although the knowledge was out there. But it’s not deemed as important enough to be given a platform where the broader public [knows] about it.”

When detected in its early stages, the 5-year survival rate for localized prostate cancer that hasn’t spread to other parts of the body is more than 99 percent, according to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

“In other words, the chance of a man dying from his prostate cancer is generally low,” the organization’s website states. “However, prostate cancer comes in many forms, and some men can have aggressive prostate cancer even when it appears to be confined to the prostate.”

Speaking to Deadline, McQueen said his genetic predisposition to prostate cancer led him to undergo routine MRI scans and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) checks, which allowed him to catch his tumor early.

“In some ways, you could say, my dad saved my life because, unfortunately, he died of it,” he said.

Medical imaging procedures, such as MRIs, can help identify prostate tumors by providing detailed pictures of the inside of the gland. PSA checks are another standard screening tool that measures the amount of PSA—a protein produced by the prostate—in the blood. Higher levels of PSA may signify the presence of prostate cancer, the Mayo Clinic reports.

“The cancer’s gone, and that’s down to early detection,” McQueen told the publication.

“Early detection means virtually a hundred percent success rate. Again, it’s a cancer that if you detect early, it’s totally survivable and curable.”