“I’m going to direct a movie. I’m writing it. I had cancer a long time ago and the story revolves around that.” In the columns of Télé Star, Nicolas Gob revealed to have fought a long illness. When he was only 26 years old, the Belgian actor was diagnosed with testicular cancer which degenerated. “The problem is that unfortunately I waited. I was filming at the same time, I was a young actor, I hadn’t dared to say that I had a problem… I really waited a long time. I I had metastases which rose everywhere: on the kidneys, in the thorax …”, he remembers with Gala, this Saturday, February 4. Operated initially, Nicolas Gob then underwent a long chemotherapy “to try to reduce the metastases which had arrived after the testicular cancerous tumor”. “The first two weeks I didn’t have much and then I felt these waves come and smash the rock that I thought I was,” he describes.
“It got harder and harder. At the end, I couldn’t even climb the stairs, but I did it. It would almost be like doing it again,” he confided to our colleagues, with disconcerting sincerity: “It transcended my nature, the young man that I was, the man that I have become”. If he decided to speak publicly about this disease, it is above all to make men aware of this cancer which is still too taboo. “We are in such a stigmatized society, regrets Nicolas Gob in the columns of Gala. It calls into question: what is it to be a man? How? Does it go through the balls? By what it represents by force I’ve never been like that too much, but it calls into question a lot of things.” Today, the actor lives “very well” with “one less ball today”. “I have two children, I can make love with my wife without problem, he assures our colleagues. It does not question the man that I am, nor the potential virility that I could have. “
Nicolas Gob: “I learned that I was strong enough anyway”
If he is now out of the woods, Nicolas Gob remembers being very afraid of dying when he learned of his illness. But this fight, the actor has made it a strength that helps him in everyday life. And that changed the way he sees himself. What has cancer taught him? “I was already able to go after something. I learned that I was strong enough anyway. Even if I don’t care to be, that’s what defines my nature. In life, we always try to think that there is not this end, that there is not this end of the tunnel, he answers directly to Gala. And there, we are confronted with it concretely, we are told: ‘I cannot guarantee that you will not die’.” But what he regrets is having waited so long to see a doctor. “I was afraid that I would be told bad news, says Nicolas Gob again. Which was the case and which makes the wait completely ridiculous and stupid because the result could have been less serious.”
Nicolas Gob © PATRICK BERNARD