Alex Dvorak is not interested in the sanitized narrative of cancer recovery. Her short film, “Bad Survivor,” is a darkly humorous, deeply personal account that flips the script on what it means to be deemed “cured.” Dvorak wrote, executive produced, and co-directed the film alongside Katie North, leading an exceptional team that includes Director of Photography Maddalena De Beni and a dedicated cast, including her own family members. “Bad Survivor” focuses not on the physical fight, but on the abrupt aftermath—the psychological reckoning that began the moment she was told she was cancer free, yet felt anything but cured.
The film’s focus on the patient journey post-treatment resonated with me acutely. While much of my career has been spent on the biotech side of oncology, our industry often views remission as the end of the story. Dvorak’s work underscores a critical gap in care: the emotional and psychological transition that occurs once the medical crisis has passed. Her portrayal of a survivor’s internal struggle provides a necessary and unvarnished perspective that often gets overlooked.
The film’s most striking sequence recreates Dvorak’s final appointment, which she describes as “incredibly autobiographical.” Instead of the expected celebratory release, she recalls a sense of confusion and disbelief. Regarding the moment she was told the cancer was gone, she recounted, “My parents were in tears and so joyful and so thankful… And I was very confused because I didn’t feel well. I didn’t feel healthy. I certainly didn’t look healthy. So I didn’t understand someone telling me that I was healthy or that this was over.”
This clinical detachment is embodied by the oncologists in the film, whom Dvorak jokingly refers to as “breaking up” with the patient. This portrayal, while fictionalized for dramatic effect, speaks to a real isolation, especially for young adults. Dvorak was the only teenager in her treatment wing, an experience she is now advocating to change. She explained, “I think being a teenager in treatment is a really strange experience because you perhaps are in school… And you are learning about yourself and about life. And there you are in treatment, and you are expected to go through it… in ways we do not yet have the tools for at 19.”
The years-long delay between remission and mental recovery is central to Dvorak’s current advocacy. She notes that she did not start truly processing the experience until seven years into remission, identifying the emotional fallout as a complicated mix of PTSD, survivor’s guilt, depression, and post-treatment addictions. She observed that when treatment was aggressive, “in order to survive I had to sort of shut down in a lot of ways and get through it… And I found that once I quote-unquote survived and was told, ‘You’re cancer free,’ that’s when for me a lot of the emotions rushed in—a lot of the unprocessed trauma.”
By channeling this experience into art, Dvorak has found a form of catharsis. She notes that the film allowed her character to “say all of the sassy, naughty things that I never would have said out loud in real life.” Now, the short, which has been selected for multiple film festivals, is serving as a launching pad for a graphic novel and a television series she is currently developing. These larger projects will allow her to expand on the complex themes of rebellion, family dynamics, and the hidden life of the “bad survivor.”
Alex Dvorak spoke with Awards Focus about revisiting her family’s most traumatic moment for the camera, the critical need for post-treatment support, and her path from high-fashion model to advocate and writer.
Awards Focus: It’s great to see you. I’ve spent most of my career on the biotech side of cancer, so your film really resonated with me. Could you walk me through your journey since the time of your diagnosis in 2009?
Alex Dvorak: Yes. I was 19 years old when I was diagnosed. I was a sophomore in college and dropped out and started full time treatment at that point. Treatment was less than a year – about four rounds of chemo and radiation and some surgeries thrown in there. And then I think everyone on the outside thought it was a really quick timeline, but somehow on the inside, it felt like a lifetime, you know?
AF: And in terms of your initial diagnosis and treatment plan, did everything essentially go as expected?
Dvorak: Yeah, it did. It was very aggressive and very effective. Luckily for me, my tumor started to shrink immediately. I must have been halfway through treatment, or maybe three-fourths of the way, when I was considered cancer free, and we just had to keep barreling along to make sure. But yes, everything went as planned, luckily.
AF: Given that this was more than a decade ago, when did the idea for the graphic novel and eventually the short film really begin to take shape?
Dvorak: Yeah. For me, right after treatment, I went back to school, got my degree, and started to very slowly heal mentally, physically, and emotionally. Then I had an entire career as a high fashion runway model where I was not telling anyone what I had been through. I really attempted to put it in the past and wanted to be seen in a new light, so I moved to a new city like New York, made new friends, and started this new career in fashion.
It was about seven years into remission when I started to think, “Okay, wait, maybe I need to process some of this.” A lot of the writing started to pour out, and I joined a cancer survivor support group for young people at MSK. That’s when I started to realize that a lot of our stories connected in so many ways, and I wasn’t alone in a lot of the experiences and feelings that I had. The way I thought I was completely solo, the only person in the world who felt this way, truly.
That’s when the writing really took off for me. That’s when all of these ideas for the films, for the TV series, for the graphic novel, and a memoir all started to converge. And then I’ve slowly been releasing and creating these stories.
AF: When you talk about the emotions that surfaced years into remission, would you describe them mostly as trauma or PTSD, or do you feel it was more connected to survivor guilt, which you reference briefly in the film?
Dvorak: Yeah, it’s layered and nuanced and so many emotions. It’s hard to condense it down to one thing, but yes, survivor’s guilt, absolutely. A lot of the PTSD, the addictions that you come out of treatment with, the depression, the anxieties. In my experience, going through an aggressive form of treatment, in order to survive I had to sort of shut down in a lot of ways and get through it: get through the day, get through the next ten minutes, get through the procedure, get through whatever was right in front of me.
I found that once I quote-unquote survived and was told, “You’re cancer free, go home and kind of start over,” that’s when for me a lot of the emotions rushed in—a lot of the unprocessed trauma.
So, it’s sort of like reliving it two or three times over again in therapy and with family and friends in order to process and hopefully, you know, maybe getting to the other side isn’t the term, but to restart life but be integrated. Not shoving away what I’d been through, but rather feeling it and kind of going through it for the first time.
AF: How much of what we see in the short reflects your actual last day of treatment? It is played with humor, but when everyone expects the big emotional hug and celebration, was your real reaction similar to what we see on screen?
Dvorak: It’s so autobiographical that it’s embarrassing, if I’m being honest. Yeah. My oncologists—I’ll never forget—we were walking through the hospital and they brought me and my parents into this really strange room. I knew my hospital backward and forward, right? This was my home. I knew every room. I knew every nurse. I knew every person. This was actually where I felt most comfortable in the chaos. I didn’t really want to go home. I didn’t understand home anymore or others my age.
They brought me into this odd room that had all these computers and all these wires. I was like, “Why are we in this broom closet?” It was just odd.
And they sat me down and they showed me a scan of my tumor that was now shrunken and considered dead and scar tissue. And they said, “You’re cancer free, and your treatment is going to be ending in a week, and it’s time to go home.”
And I did not react. My parents were in tears and so joyful and so thankful and hugging and crying and all these things. And I was very confused because I didn’t feel well. I didn’t feel healthy. I certainly didn’t look healthy. So I didn’t understand someone telling me that I was healthy or that this was over. I was in the trauma. I was in it.
My doctor leaned in and was like, “Hey, Alex, this is the part where you’re supposed to be happy.” And I was so confused. Happy was so far away from what I was feeling.
That was incredibly autobiographical. And for me in the film Bad Survivor, I’m able to, through this character, talk to the camera and say all of the sassy, naughty things that I never would have said out loud in real life to my oncologists or to my family, never wanting to make anyone feel bad. But there I am in the short film trying to express all those emotions that were unprocessed in the real life version.
AF: The introduction includes a note that any depiction is intentional and that the individuals portrayed will know who they are. While most characters appear in a generally positive light, I was struck by the portrayal of the oncologists. Many patients describe their oncologists as lifesavers, yet here it almost feels like they are firing you as a patient. Were these characters intended to represent your primary oncologist or specialists, and what was your real relationship like with your doctors?
Dvorak: Yeah. Aizzah Fatima, who’s an incredible writer and actor, she plays the nurse practitioner. On her day of filming, I remember pulling her aside after we had a take or two, and I was like, “You can be meaner. Go ham. I want you to.” Because we are friends in real life, she was like, “I don’t want to make you feel bad.” I was like, “No, no, make me feel bad. This is great. This is the story to me.”
I wanted the oncologists in “Bad Survivor” to be really like they are tired of having to deal with this girl’s daily emotions, sass, and angst, and they are ready for her to leave the hospital. In an original, older version of “Bad Survivor,” our title was “The Breakup” because I really see that scene as the doctors breaking up with her, essentially and very literally saying, “We are no longer your full time care team because you don’t need it. You can leave now.”
In the short film and in real life, I was a teen in cancer treatment, and I was the only teen in the wing. I was the only teen being treated, and there were all little kids and toddlers. And I think being a teenager in treatment is a really strange experience because you perhaps are in school, maybe you want to go to parties and pass your finals, maybe lose your virginity, and have a good time. And you are learning about yourself and about your body and about life. And there you are in treatment, and you are expected to go through it or handle it in ways we do not yet have the tools for at 19.
At 19, I thought I was very grown. I thought I was really independent. I thought I could make all my own decisions. And now I am 35, and looking back, when I see 19 year olds now, I cannot believe I was that young in treatment. We are babies in a lot of ways.
And I just think there is a version in real life, which is something I am trying to work with Teen Cancer America on and educating healthcare teams on, on what teens and young adults need in that position, because it is different than all other groups.
AF: I can imagine being the oldest patient on the floor creates expectations. And being a teenager is already hard enough without cancer, right?
Dvorak: Yeah, it is hard and it is a confusing time and a little too much. I found that with the younger patients, the parents are the ones being told the difficult parts of treatments, and the kids are in the coloring room. And perhaps they know way more than we think they do, right, as per usual. But many times they do not. And they are trying to just live their kid lives.
And as a teenager, I knew everything that was going on, and it was depressing and really difficult and so challenging and very humbling. And it was tough to know as much as I knew and yet being expected to smile through it and be grateful that it was quote-unquote easy, but nothing was easy about what I went through.
AF: When you decided to film this story, you were bringing your family back into an extremely difficult time and even recreating your own physical appearance. What was that experience like for you and for your parents and sister?
Dvorak: Yeah. So I cast my real family. My sister played my sister; my parents played my parents. And I told them about three weeks before filming. I had really been considering who I should be hiring.
And my mother is an incredibly wonderful, trained actor, but no one else in my family is. And so I thought, okay, I will hire all these other actors. At some point I was like, I do not know who I could possibly hire that would play my multicultural parents that are always bickering in different languages and think they are disagreeing, but they are agreeing, and being in the middle and trying to translate. And the sister who is scared of the hospital and maybe a little bit pissed off that she is not the center of attention in the family anymore, and all these dynamics. I was like, I do not think I can recreate it with others. It really needs to be them.
And luckily they were down. They were such good sports. I was really nervous about potentially recreating this, the most traumatic moment in our family’s history. But they were down and they did it.
And for me personally, I was nervous. I was not sleeping several nights before, a little nervous of what it was like even just being in a gown and recreating what it was to be bald and at the same dinner. We also filmed in my childhood bedroom and my childhood home, which is where I was during treatment.
And luckily, because the main character gets to have these empowered moments speaking to the camera, it felt amazing. It was actually recreating this thing—what a strange experiment, right? But to recreate it but actually get to be sassy and say what you really wanted to say back in the day and have it be on your terms felt amazing. It felt really empowering.
AF: In defining what you call a “bad survivor,” how long did you feel you were in that phase? At what point did you begin to feel like you could be happy again and really celebrate being cancer free, and have you fully reached that point?
Dvorak: I have. I have, thank you for asking, giving me that leeway. I certainly have. I have been in remission for 15 years now, and I think it took me probably three. I think it took me probably three years to genuinely feel happy. And I felt happiness and joy in a way I never had prior.
So, I don’t know, feeling grateful to be breathing and to be alive and for any experience, whether that be good or bad, is a really cool place to be. And I still feel very lucky in a way and really grateful that I get to feel that as a relatively still young person, just being grateful to be here.
But it took some time, and I would love for there to be more awareness around how long it takes. I remember meeting a girl, a random girl on the street in New York, and I do not know how we started talking, and she told me she was a survivor and she was one year out, but she was still really struggling. And I was like, “Oh my God, babe, you are only one year out. It is okay. We are going to take some time, you got this.”
And it takes time. It takes time to process everything we have been through. It also takes time for the body to physically heal and cleanse, and it is a lot to process. And then being a survivor is kind of a forever experience too. So we kind of have these waves as we go through remission.
AF: I have spent most of my career in oncology on the biotech side, and I know a lot of patient education stops at the point when treatment ends. After remission, there is often very little support. If you could go back and tell physicians or even pharmaceutical companies what they should understand about survivorship, what would be the most important things they tend to overlook about the patient journey after treatment ends?
Dvorak: It is really the start to what I always consider my bonus life. So it is the start. I love that you are sharing that. We have all this paperwork and research about what happens until they are considered cured or cancer free. And sure, medically that is accurate; the cancer may be gone from the body, but you are this brand new person in what felt like to me a brand new body that did not function the way it used to, the way I wanted it to, the way anyone else my age did.
And you know so much about life and death. You have been through so much trauma. I have so much to say because that was the inspiration behind Bad Survivor, trying to show that when you come home, you have to start life from scratch.
For me, in my experience, one of the biggest problems I had coming home and feeling like the breakup of “You are good, go home and we do not need to see you again for three months,” one of the biggest issues I had was addiction. You know, we are given so much medication, then so much medication on top of that to quell and calm symptoms and anxiety and sleep, and then you go home and it is like, “Okay, no more, no more.” And my body still very much felt in pain.
I did not attribute that to anxiety and depression. And I think that is an easy thing for a doctor or physician to say, “Okay, we have to fix the mental,” and that is one hundred percent true and accurate—that needs to be worked on in tandem. But my body was still very much going through so much, and there was not education around it. I really felt like I went home without support or anyone to talk to who had been through it my age or otherwise.
And it is a big mental hurdle to go from being monitored second by second to being told, “See you in three months.” That is a lifetime, a lifetime for a new survivor.
AF: The film has a line about how it only takes one cell for cancer to return. In oncology we know recurrence is possible because there can be residual cells circulating even after successful treatment. When you wrote that line, was it based on how you personally still feel, and do you ever believe you are one hundred percent cured, or is there always a concern that something could return?
Dvorak: Tough question. At the time when I was diagnosed, I was given a cancer binder, and I referenced this in the film too. And I remember becoming obsessed with my cancer binder. I wanted to know everything about everything of the science that was happening within my body, and the science behind the treatment that I was getting and what was going to work and why. And I would just study it and study it every day, really. I became quite obsessed with the concept of cancer.
And I was very aware that it could only take one asshole cell. And if that is how it started, how do I know that there is not one? And, speaking of the mental hurdles and the anxieties that come with being a survivor, that was certainly a really big one.
And for me, survivorship, each scan I got, each PET scan with a clean bill of health, at some point—and maybe it took a couple years—I started to think, “Okay, maybe I do not have to have all my defenses up.” I was always ready to go back into treatment mentally because I did not want to get caught off guard again in my life. And of course, it is a really terrible way to live life.
And I think after two years I thought, “Oh shit, I might actually live. What if they are right? What if I am cured? What if I am going to live a long life?” Well, then I am going to have to figure out a new way of thinking because I cannot live in this stress and anxiety for my whole life. What if I live till 90?
The more good scans you get, the more the potential for life to elongate becomes a real reality. And I would say now I do trust it, with the really strong caveat of anyone who knows me and reads this interview would know, with a ton of regimented steps that I take in order to feel as though I am in control of everything I can be in control of with my health. So that comes with a really strict lifestyle.
AF: You describe yourself now as a “good survivor” by sharing your story and becoming an advocate. Beyond this film, where are you with the other projects you mentioned, including the graphic novel and the potential series? Are those still actively moving forward?
Dvorak: Yes. So all of these projects I am somehow juggling all at the same time. And I am so, so, so excited for them to come out and officially be announced. So the graphic novel will be announced soon by the publisher but is not yet, so I am not allowed to say too much. But it is, if someone enjoys the short film, they will certainly enjoy this more massive graphic novel that I get to sink my teeth into, a larger story, which also leads me into the TV series that I am developing right now.
So that is, the short film I have had on the film festival circuit the last year and a half. I have been traveling around the country and doing these Q and As, really connecting with audiences and getting a sense of where everyone laughs in the room, where they want to know more, what questions are coming up in the Q and As. And that has really, really helped me hone in on the TV series, which I am so excited for. I really felt like this short film felt like the validation that, “Okay, we do have a lot to say as young survivors in the world, and there is so much more to explore with this story.” So all of these are going to soon, soon be coming out now.
AF: A fun question. You could certainly play yourself again as you do in “Bad Survivor,” but have you imagined a dream casting scenario if budget were not an issue?
Dvorak: It is so hard to imagine it being anyone but me. I cannot wait to become her again. I find it so cathartic and therapeutic and so fun. And I do not know, as a 35 year old actor, really, sometimes hold myself together and say the right thing and be eloquent. I just love being able to say whatever I want and curse and just let it all out. That is truly me.
I often say that we are kind of stuck at the age where we had trauma. So I am 19 forever. It is just what it is. So I really want to play her.
But what is funny is the second you asked it, I do not know if you noticed, but there is the one scene where the main character walks into her bedroom and she is kind of turned to the side, and she puts her hood up, and the picture next to her is Emma Watson.
AF: Hermione.
Dvorak: Yes, Hermione. So in real life, because this was my bedroom when I had cancer and growing up, the day Emma Watson, she had a pixie cut. And at the time, I could not find women with short hair, right. And I was bald and then slowly growing out my hair, and I felt really insecure that I did not have long hair anymore. And she, so the second you mentioned who would it be, suddenly I am thinking of her. She is just so iconic. But if I am playing the main character, maybe she can be my sassy best friend who is thriving in life.
AF: Beyond this story, do you have aspirations to develop other projects or work in other parts of the industry?
Dvorak: Always. So I wrote, executive produced, co-directed, and acted in the short film. I absolutely love writing and directing. I love being behind the camera. I love creating the concept. I love developing several episodes. So yeah, for me, I am working on a documentary feature right now. So I am really interested. I am definitely honing in on my voice across the spectrum of my projects as being of teen rebellion. I love true life stories. I love the angsty teen and young adults.
And the documentary feature that I am working on right now is based in Prague, and it is about a teen boy during Russian occupation and the black market business that he creates in order to rebel and be a true teen and listen to Bowie. So yeah, so many projects, and the industry has really thankfully opened its arms to me. And it has been a wonderful journey. So I am excited to see what is next.
AF: Where will people be able to see the film? Are you still on the festival circuit?
Dvorak: Yes. So we are still in festivals right now. Our next one, in a couple of weeks, we are going to be at the Anchorage International Film Festival screening there. And then right now we are deep in our For Your Consideration campaign and reaching out to voters in the industry at large to put “Bad Survivor” on their radar. And then after that, let us see about distribution. Hopefully it is streaming somewhere and available for everyone to watch.
AF: It has been a pleasure talking to you. I hope we get to speak again.
Dvorak: Thank you.
Learn more about Alex’s story and “Bad Survivor” at www.badsurvivor.com