Edward James Olmos appeared on the Mando & Friends podcast with Mando Fresko this week, discussing, for the first time, that he has been fighting throat cancer. The 76-year-old Emmy-winner and Oscar-nominee concluded radiation and chemo in December, and has been working to regain his strength since. He did not spare listeners from some of the more brutal aspects of his treatment.

“The doctors would say right before I started, ‘There’s only one thing we have to tell you, we do not know what you’re gonna sound like.’” He continued, “We’re shooting your vocal cords, we’re shooting your throat; where you eat, where you swallow, where you talk, breathe, everything goes through here.” He said he still had a bump on his lymph nodes, which were burned out by radiation.

“It becomes the hardest place to shoot, to use radiation and chemo,” he said, adding, “a lot of my friends have passed because of this. It’s a very strong disease.”

He further explained that he lost 55 pounds and all of his muscle mass during treatment. “I was in good condition—and I still am,” he said. “I swim a mile a day at least, sometimes two miles a day. Every day, seven days a week. And then I row, and I do weights.” But it took a while to get there:

“There were times in the months that I was undergoing the treatments that the body gives up. And I didn’t want to take my food through my stomach. They wanted to put tubes in and feed me nutrients because I couldn’t swallow. They had to get 2,500 calories into my body every day. That was ridiculous, that was so hard.”

"It was an experience that changed me, the understanding of how wonderful this life is," he concluded. "I've been through some experiences that have gotten me close to death, but that was close.”

Edward James Olmos first came to prominence in the early 1980s in films like Blade Runner (he has the eerie last line) and Wolfen (you may recall a scene between him and Albert Finney atop the steel beams of the Manhattan Bridge), then appeared 106 episodes of Miami Vice as Lt. Martin Castillo. He was nominated for two Emmys for the role, winning in 1985. 

In 1988 he was nominated for an Oscar for his leading role in Stand and Deliver, a sleeper hit about the inspirational Bolivian-American mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante. In 1992, Olmos directed and starred in American Me, a Mexican-American crime epic. In 1996, he starred in one of the weirdest low-budget movies of the American independent movement of the era, the erotic fish tale Caught, and in 1997 starred as Abraham Quintanilla Jr. in Selena.

In 1997 he co-founded the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, and in 1998 he founded the nonprofit Latino Public Broadcasting.

While Olmos's career has marched on with roles on shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Mayans M.C., and in films like 2 Guns and The Green Hornet, it’s because of the 73 episodes as “The Old Man,” Admiral William “Husker” Adama, that many of us would march into battle for him without hesitation. Indeed, it is rare that a television show gets invited to give a presentation at the United Nations, but that’s Bill Adama for you. So say we all!