“Friends”: Gunther actor James Michael Tyler has cancer

Friends fans know James Michael Tyler as barista Gunther, who has been secretly in love with Rachel for all ten seasons of the sitcom. In the great reunion of the cult sitcom, which was broadcast at the end of May, he only took part by video call. And that although he was one of the most important supporting roles.

“Friends”: James Michael Tyler hat Krebs im Spätstadium

Now Tyler announced that he has been fighting prostate cancer since 2018. “I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had spread to my bones,” Tyler told Today magazine. “I’ve had this diagnosis for the past three years. It’s stage 4 (now) late-stage cancer. So I will probably get it at some point,” he said.

His doctor found the cancer in an annual check-up. “I was 56 years old at the time and they did a PSA test, which is a prostate-specific antigen,” he explained. “The result was extraordinarily high. So when I went online and saw the results of my blood test and my blood test, I knew that there was obviously something wrong. My doctor called me almost immediately and said: ‘Hey, you have to come to see me tomorrow because I suspect you might have a pretty serious problem with your prostate'”he remembered.

Now he’s doing chemotherapy

Hormone therapy helped him in the beginning. “All I had to do was take a pill morning and night and boom, life was pretty much normal,” said the actor.

But he missed a check-up, which had fatal consequences. “So the cancer chose to mutate at the time of the pandemic, and that’s how it progressed,” Tyler explained. He is currently undergoing aggressive chemotherapy aimed at fighting cancer. With his story, the Gunther actor wants to call on men to go to check-up appointments – because he knows that his cancer could have been treated if it had been found earlier.