Actor Colin McFarlane has revealed he has early stage prostate cancer.
The 61-year-old star, best known for his role in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy as well as BBC sitcom Not Going Out, was given the diagnosis in December following testing.
Married father-of-three Colin said he is glad to have kept up with his checks over the past eight years, which caught the cancer early.
The actor said one in four Black men are at risk of the disease, which kills 12,000 men a year.
But he said not many know that men are two-and-a-half times more likely to get prostate cancer if their father or brother has had it.
His father, Sidney, had issues with his own enlarged prostate, which turned out to be benign.
The actor has two brothers and had already urged them to get tested – with one discovering he also had prostate cancer.
Colin said: “My dad is benign but he had an operation in 1999 and he said to me, ‘oh, I decided not to tell you and your brothers because I didn’t want to worry you’.
“He had no awareness of the fact that, actually, it was really important that he told us because there’s a genetic link.”
In Colin’s case, he had expected to get a clear result after being told by his doctor there was only a 30% chance that he had it.
He said: “You think, well, there’s a 70% chance that I’m OK.”
Doctors told him the cancer was T1 out of five categories which is considered the earliest stage, telling him that he is “very low-risk”.
At present he does not need any treatment. Colin explained: “They said ‘we will just give you a blood test, the same blood test that highlighted this.
"We will now do that as a prostate specific antigen test every three months.’ And then once a year, I’ll have an MRI.”
The actor, who divides his time between homes in Lincoln and London with wife Kate and children Josh, Jonny and Em, wants to raise awareness as part of a Father’s Day campaign alongside Prostate Cancer UK.
He said: “Fathers need to lead by example. My own research of just talking to men is that I rarely meet anybody who knows anything about prostate cancer.
“If you have prostate cancer, a positive message here is that if
you catch it early, it’s treatable and curable.
“But the trouble is, men are waiting for symptoms. This probably means the cancer has spread.”
- Visit prostatecanceruk.org/risk-checker to check your own risk.
