In 2012, Christine Handy learned she had breast cancer. She was 41. At the time, the career in modeling that she began as a child was still thriving.
“My whole identity was kind of wrapped up into everything external, including external accolades and billboards and everything outside of me,” Handy told Raquel Calhoun during a Q&A following TheWrap’s screening of her film, “Hello Beautiful.” “I realized with the cancer diagnosis that none of that had to do with anything that’s important. When you’re down to nothing, you have to rebuild yourself on something, and so I rebuilt myself. Instead of self-serving, I decided to serve.”
She wrote a novel, 2017’s “Walk Beside Me,” based on her experience as a breast cancer survivor. Now, that book has been adapted into a film written, directed and produced by Ziad H. Hamzeh and exec-produced by Handy. The film shot in just 18 days, starring Tricia Helfer as Willow Boutrous, a character inspired by Handy and Tarek Bishara as Khalil, Willow’s husband.
The goal with the book and the film, Handy said, was to counter the poisonous image of petty, backstabbing women as epitomized by Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise (at peak appeal when she was writing) and to counter the trend of “fear-based” media related to cancer diagnoses. Handy wanted hope — and she wanted to share that hope with others.
“I had this little dream back then that I could change that. I could show survivorship in film,” she said. “Every time I went to anybody to talk about it, they said, ‘Yeah, but you’re just a model. How are you ever gonna get that done?’ Well 13 years later — last week I had my 13-year cancer-free anniversary — and here we are . . . I think sharing stories of hope can be very healing.”
Hamzeh found that to be true for Handy’s book. “It was not the typical novel which you would read. It was an account. A real, truthful account,” he said. “I thought, ‘My God, if anyone can go through what this lady has gone through and actually survive and actually come back like a phoenix from ashes to do so many wonderful things for the world, I have to know why. I have to know the secret of what makes a human being so capable of that return.’”
At the Q&A, Bishara spoke about how the film came into his life around the time his father was diagnosed with cancer. “I’ve been getting him through chemo the last I would say year, and he’s actually doing OK right now, but it’s just so interesting the way the universe works,” Bishara said. “I don’t think I would’ve been the same kind of caregiver to my dad had I not done this movie, had I not read her book, had I not played this character where I explored certain versions of, ‘Hey, you don’t always have to be an angel. Hey, you don’t always have to be acting at your best.’ There could be moments of anger, there could be moments of frustration, there could be moments where you don’t know what to do, or you do feel confused, or you do feel scared.’”
Handy said she felt it was important not to “horde” her story or give into shame or fear. “Hope is a muscle, but we have to use it,” she said. “We have to practice it, and I’m hoping that people watch this and go, ‘I’m gonna focus on hope and not fear,’ because there’s so much fear in our world, and there’s so much fear in a diagnosis.”
Watch the full conversation below.
