In film and on TV: 'The terror that is cancer'

Hollywood is exploring the topic of cancer.

Mia Wasikowska is a terminally ill cancer patient who meets a guy who crashes funerals. On Sept. 30, Joseph Gordon-Levitt grapples with a potentially deadly form of spinal cancer in 50/50. In next year's Now Is Good, Dakota Fanning plays a girl dying of leukemia and going through her bucket list.

They join TV's Laura Linney, who is battling melanoma on Showtime's The Big C (Mondays, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT), and AMC's Breaking Bad, renewed for its fifth and final season and starring Bryan Cranston as a meth dealer with lung cancer. And on Lifetime, Jennifer Aniston and Demi Moore helped direct Five, interconnected short films about breast cancer airing in October.

The parallels between the projects? Realism, as opposed to overwrought sentimentality, coupled with a little surrealism and hefty dollops of black humor.

"That is what making movies is about, finding the truth and telling it the best way you know how," Fanning says. "I was really moved by the thought of a young girl knowing that there are so many things she will never achieve and truly making the most of what's left of her life."

The mandate for cast and crew: no histrionics or handwringing.

"The biggest challenge is tone. Because the stakes are so high, it's very easy to go into a place of melodrama," says Bryce Dallas Howard, who produced Restless and stars in 50/50. "There's not a higher stake than someone having to face their own death. That's what these movies deal with in different kinds of ways."

A little levity goes a long way. "It helps bring the terror that is cancer home. Let's face it: There's nothing funny about that disease," says Linney's C co-star John Benjamin Hickey.

In 50/50, Gordon-Levitt's best friend uses the disease to pick up girls; Linney's once-estranged husband on The Big C decides to become her personal concierge after he learns of her diagnosis.

"I had cancer, so I know the absurd things that can happen. You always want to be true to the emotional state of the character, and not go into wackiness," says Big C executive producer Jenny Bicks. "We're constantly monitoring ourselves. It's a very fine line."

And a very relatable topic. Nearly everyone has known a person with cancer. More broadly, the concept of life and death is a universal one. "It's something everyone can identify with," says 50/50 director Jonathan Levine.