The CW’s Arrow actor, Stephen Amell is not the only superhero in his family. His mother has battled breast cancer twice now, and won. In 2012, Amell had just finished shooting the pilot for Arrow, and flew home to Toronto to be with his mother and celebrate her one year anniversary of fighting breast cancer. Amell and his mother had posed for a picture during the celebration, both donning extended middle fingers.
“My mom was going through chemotherapy in April of 2012 and she and I just took a photo outside of a bar in Toronto when I was visiting. I was just giving the middle finger to the camera — representing ‘f— cancer,” Amell told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview this month. “At the time, I didn’t know there was a charity called F— Cancer. They got in touch via Twitter and we’ve been working together ever since.”
The F— Cancer INWYKIWYK™, was started by co-founder Julie Greenbaum after losing her mother to ovarian cancer in 2010. The foundation gets its name from something Julie’s mother had said while being asked by a nurse how she was doing after just undergoing a very invasive procedure. “How am I doing? This is a walk in the park…FUCK CANCER!” The moniker INWYKIWYK™ stands for “It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know,” embraces the fact that we gain strength in numbers and power from people who have the ability to have a farther reaching voice than the average person.
By hosting charity events, F— Cancer has gained the respect, acknowledgement and direct support from celebrities in Hollywood who share a passion for giving the finger to a horrible disease like cancer, one of these is our very own DC Comics superhero Arrow, played by Stephen Amell.
Amell created his own t-shirt design through a micro-funding company called Represent, to help raise funds for F— Cancer, in honor of his mother.
If you would like to support Stephen Amell and the countless others around the world who have been touched by cancer in this campaign, you can get your very own F— Cancer t-shirt, tank top, or hoodie created by Stephen Amell here or you can go to the official F— Cancer website here and make a purchase of their many different colored F— Cancer shirts, representing the various forms of cancers. All proceeds go to the following centers to fund cancer research in hopes of finding a cure: Jewish General Hospital Foundation Segal Cancer Centre, UCLA Johnson Cancer Centre, The Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre and the UHN Toronto General and Western Hospital Foundation.
If you would like to start your own Represent campaign in honor of someone you know that has been affected by cancer, you can go here.
Sources: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/why-arrow-star-stephen-amell-735298, http://fcancerevents.com/about-us/
