“There’s a picture there I was going to direct and star in that was starting in the fall. The doctor called me when I was in Alabama ready to shoot and said they found one more tumour in the liver,” Lundgren said. “So I was like ‘Oh okay.’ At that point, it started to hit me that this is kind of something serious.”

He said the doctor informed him that the tumour had grown so large it was inoperable.

That meant a different kind of treatment which Lundgren’s fiancée, Emma Krokdal, said left him with horrible side effects.

“His mouth got really sore,” she recalled. “His hands got sore, [his] feet and he couldn’t eat anything warm, anything cold or anything spicy. So that was a struggle to get food down so he kept losing weight.”

“The Expendables” star said he was given two to three years to live, though he said he sensed the doctor who told him that didn’t believe Lundgren had that much time.

“I mean you kind of look at your life going ‘Oh I’ve had a great life,’” he said. “I’ve had a freaking great life. I’ve lived like five lifetimes in one already with everything I’ve done.”

“So It wasn’t like I was bitter about it,” he added. “It was just like, you know, feel sorry for my kids and my fiancée and people around you.”

His daughter, actress Ida Lundgren, 27, got visibly emotional talking about her father.

“I had a deep conversation with my dad about what would happen if he, you know, passed away and stuff,” she said. “That was a horrible conversation.”

Fortunately, the elder Lundgren got a second opinion from oncologist Dr Alexandra Drakaki, who did another biopsy. She found a mutation which made cancer treatable by medication which has helped shrink the tumours by 90 per cent.

“There are certain parts of his body that the cancer is responding really well,” Drakaki said. “There are some lesions that we cannot see anymore. So that is above expectations.”

Lundgren got emotional talking about how he feels now.

“You know you appreciate life a lot more,” he said. “You appreciate every day.”