It was another perfect spa-blue morning in Beverly Hills when Mark Hoppus, a pop-punk legend, accidentally told the world that he had cancer. This was back in late June, and Hoppus had just taken a photo of himself strapped into a chemotherapy chair, an image he wanted to share. But being woozy from the Benadryl and cocktail of cell-destroying drugs, his clumsy fingers made haptic contact with the wrong cluster of pixels on his phone. Thus the photo—the caption read, “Yes hello. One cancer treatment, please”—was transmitted not to his green circle of “close friends” on Instagram, but to his entire following of more than 1 million. A tragicomic oopsie.
And then, a mess: First in the form of a concerned text from his manager, asking if he meant to do that. Then the radio stations started calling. And then a fire hose of frantic text messages from friends Hoppus hadn’t yet told. He quickly took down the post, but the genie was out of the bottle.
“Throughout the day as I’m getting chemotherapy and more bags of chemicals are being dripped into my body, other people are reaching out and they’re like, ‘Dude, what’s going on?’ ” Hoppus remembered. But he could pay only intermittent attention to what he’d unleashed. “Chemo is like being on the worst international, overnight flight where you can’t sleep or get comfortable,” he told me. Later, as his wife, Skye, drove him home, Hoppus tapped out a brief statement: “For the past three months I’ve been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. I have cancer. It sucks and I’m scared, and at the same time I’m blessed with incredible doctors and family and friends to get me through this.”
He had been diagnosed a couple of months earlier with stage 4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive form of blood cancer, the same kind his mom had.
For those who glimpsed it, the image of Mark Hoppus there in the chair that morning was shattering, largely because of how Mark Hoppus is etched into our collective memories: young, defiant, indefatigable—a forever avatar of cheery SoCal dickishness.
The band that made Hoppus famous, Blink-182, jumped into the public eye in the late ’90s, flanked on one side by soft, radio-friendly boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and on the other by over-caffeinated nu-metal outfits like Limp Bizkit. A skate-punk trio from San Diego, Blink possessed a paradoxical knack for writing pop songs—a fact which helped explain why they were abhorred by many of the bands that inspired them. (In a track called “Fun Things to Fuck (If You’re a Winner),” Fat Mike of NOFX completes an otherwise unprintable tercet with “Fuck fans of Blink-182.”) Yet instead of shunning fame, Blink’s members embraced it—a middle finger to the punk orthodoxy’s own middle finger flashed at everything else. They gave their albums delinquent titles like Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (say it phonetically) and pranked anyone who dared enter their juvenile orbit. “When I first got in the band and we would be in airports or any public restroom, Mark would go in and pull his pants all the way down to his ankles. We’d just be looking at this grown man with his bare butt out, peeing into a stall,” Travis Barker, Blink’s longtime drummer, told me.
Hoppus says he was overwhelmed by the support he felt when his diagnosis was made public.
“Mark and I were ridiculous,” said Tom DeLonge, the band’s cofounder and former guitarist. “There were so many things that were just so inappropriate. I can’t even bring them up. People were not safe interviewing us ever in a room, because I would turn off the lights and then I would turn the lights back on and it would be illegal, what was happening.”
If you were born in the 1980s or early ’90s, even if you were never a fan or a willful listener of a Blink song, the lyrics to their biggest hits—“All the Small Things,” “I Miss You”—are somehow already encoded into your subconscious, sitting there, just a few blood-alcohol-content percentages away from being karaoke’d without a teleprompter. In the years since those early hits were recorded, the group has cast a surprisingly large and enduring shadow in the culture. Their various achievements and exploits included (but were hardly limited to) presciently preaching about the existence of UFOs; starring on an MTV reality show; surviving a deadly plane crash; selling more than 50 million records worldwide; collaborating with Lil Wayne on a short-lived tour that spawned the most questionable rap mash-up ever; dating a Kardashian; and, of course, inspiring a whole generation of emo bands and SoundCloud rappers. None of it was simple or uncomplicated: They have broken up at least twice before reassembling into a lineup that today features only two of the primary three (Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba, a longtime friend of the group, has since been slotted in for DeLonge, whose ambitions have often colored him as the principal trio’s iconoclast).
Hoppus, 49, lives in Beverly Hills, near the top of a perfect hill where the phone reception is spotty and the shrubbery is protuberant. When we met in his backyard in early October, he was fresh off his sixth and final round of chemotherapy and was eager to show me the new hobby he picked up over the summer: collecting succulents. “After my first round of chemotherapy, I went out and got a cactus that has this really cool mutation in it,” he said, showing me the plant. “And I really felt attached to it because that’s a mutated plant, and my own mutation happening at the same time.” In person Hoppus is tall, about the height of your average NBA point guard. His signature spiky anime hair was gone, replaced by an undetectable layer of light peach fuzz. When he removes his Dodgers hat he looks like a powerful telepath who wants to recruit you to his school for gifted youngsters.
He’s usually a vivid storyteller, witty and sardonic. He’s been podcasting since the mid-2000s, hosted a music interview show for a few years on Fuse, and regularly streams on Twitch. But lately he’s been forgetting things: the names of close friends, places he’s been, stories that Skye tells him. Retrieving a memory seems to now take Hoppus an excruciating extra beat. “I felt so shitty,” he told me. “And the brain fog is so bad. The chemo brain is just heartbreaking to me because I can feel myself diminished mentally right now.” Which is why the Instagram slipup, for him, felt so out of character. “Maybe part of me subconsciously posted it to my main, but I definitely didn’t do it on purpose,” he said. “But I don’t know. It kind of felt like a Band-Aid had been ripped off and I was able to be honest with people.”
The first inkling that something was wrong with his body came last spring, when Hoppus felt a weird knot in his shoulder while he was sitting on his couch playing Ghost of Tsushima on PlayStation. He had recently been vaccinated and was eager for the world to start opening up again; he’d been struggling mentally during a particularly dark period of depression. Hoppus decided to get his shoulder checked out a few days before meeting with a new therapist.
“So I walk into the therapist’s office and I’m like, ‘Oh, hello. How are you doing? Very nice to meet you. Thanks for making the time—hang on a second. I have to take this call,’ ” Hoppus said. It was his doctor; the diagnosis was lymphoma. What followed was a blur: More tests were necessary, but he needed to start chemotherapy as soon as possible, which meant he had to get a port installed in his arm right away. “And I was like, ‘Okay, cool. Thank you very much.’ I hang up the phone and turn to [the therapist]. ‘Oh, hi. So, yeah, I have cancer. Where do we start?’ ”
The odd timing of the call was a blessing, Hoppus said. Therapy helped him navigate the murky first few weeks where he was still processing his cancer and how it would reorient his life. “I had a really dark time after finding out,” he said. “I went through this whole period of like, not why me, but of course me. Why wouldn’t it be me? We’ve had so much good luck and good fortune, and things have kind of fallen into place for me specifically for so long, that of course I was due. I was due for something tragic.”
Hoppus had long been a specimen of healthy living. He’d go on long bike rides regularly, and was notoriously obsessive about hygiene, even pre-COVID. (“People made fun of me because I’d always sanitize my hands everywhere.”) He isn’t much of a drinker and has long adhered to a mostly vegan lifestyle, which changed after his diagnosis and his doctor recommended that he start eating meat again, to keep his strength up. “I’ve had a lot more red meat than I ever have in the last probably 10 years,” Hoppus said.
The diagnosis had prompted him to revisit other things too. When we initially spoke in September, he told me that he’d recently been going back over old Blink tracks—songs he’d played thousands of times—discovering that they’ve suddenly taken on new meaning. Of note was “Adam’s Song,” a somber number that Hoppus wrote in his 20s, from the imagined perspective of someone who felt suicidal but ultimately made the decision to carry on the hard work of living. “I’ve had a lot of thoughts about my own mortality, a lot of thoughts about what happens when I’m gone,” he said. “And so I’ve been listening to ‘Adam’s Song,’ thinking, Yeah, tomorrow holds such better days.”
When I was a dipshit teenager, one Christmas my parents gifted me an Epiphone bass from Guitar Center. It sounded cheap and twangy, but I was stoked. After opening it I went to the family computer, printed out some tabs, and retreated to my room to learn how to play the thing. The first song I learned was “Dammit,” Blink-182’s breakout hit from their second studio album, Dude Ranch. The song was easy to learn, no more than three or four notes hammered into oblivion, undergirding a sing-shouty chorus sung by Hoppus that includes the refrain: “Well I guess this is growing up.”
The song is ostensibly about a relationship in disrepair and the lessons learned from those mistakes. And it functions as a tidy encapsulation of what made Blink-182 so successful: They sang about girls and heartache and masturbation, but fundamentally the band’s music is about perseverance. Like emo, pop punk is, by design, antithetical to anything resembling cool; it’s earnest, cathartic, and sometimes cheesy music about being on the outside of something, looking in. In a sense, Hoppus and DeLonge were the voice for a generation of disaffected suburban kids, bored out of their minds and conscripted to a comfortable drudgery, who just wanted to get through another day and post sad lyrics as their away messages.
One of the reasons the trio worked so well together is that the band was always hierarchically flat, and “we’re all completely different,” said Barker. Their creative sensibilities tugged the band’s music in different directions, but it would always stubbornly spring back into a familiar shape, like pizza dough. Mark was the glue guy, holding the center; Tom was the experimental one with big ambitions; and Travis was the only one who knew how to play his instrument.
“I’m not comparing Blink to the Beatles,” said Hoppus, “but if we were, I would be Paul, Tom would be John, and Travis would be George.” (“I’d be fine with just being Ringo and being the drummer,” said Barker, after I relayed this comparison to him.) Yet you can’t achieve balance without conflict, which like all long-running bands Blink had in abundance. In 2015, after more than two decades playing in the band, Tom DeLonge abruptly quit. Or took a break, depending on who you ask. It was a point of contention within the group, but essentially DeLonge says he needed space to focus on other things, like his family.
Still, fans were surprised when, shortly thereafter, it was announced that Matt Skiba, whose band had toured with Blink previously, had joined Blink-182 to replace Tom. “Mark invited me out for lunch at this beautiful vegan eatery,” said Skiba. He thought they were going to talk about a children’s record they’d been meaning to record as the Cereal Killers, an experimental punk band they were kicking around, but Barker came to lunch, too. “They both sat down and told me that Tom had quit. I was still thinking about him leaving the band when they morphed it into a question: Would I be interested in playing with Blink? And Mark said to me, ‘We know your schedule. We already looked. It’s just a matter of: Do you want to do it? We would have to start rehearsing immediately.’ And I said, ‘Well, of course I want to do it.’ ”
Were you worried about Tom’s feelings at all? I asked Skiba.
“It wasn’t until an hour or two later that I started to consider Tom’s feelings towards it. From what they told me, he left them holding the bag and I’ve always left it between them. It’s not really any of my business.”
Skiba continued: “Tom’s been nothing but a sweetheart to me, but it’s like somebody dating your ex-girlfriend or your ex-wife or whatever. It’s weird. No matter how cordial or adult everyone is, it’s awkward. But, people just want to see drama. They want to see a fight. Neither Tom nor myself are that kind of person. Even if it stung for him a little—and I think he said it’s a little weird—he’s man enough to admit that. I certainly didn’t take any joy in causing him any discomfort or whatever, but he and I have always been friends.”
Schisms within friend circles are as natural as they are awkward, but few disruptions play out as publicly as Blink’s. I asked Hoppus what he would say now to a younger version of himself about navigating the creative tensions within the band. “Probably the thing that I’ve learned over the years is it’s not about me,” he said after a brief pause. “People do things for themselves. People do things for their family. Anybody else’s [issues] are not a reflection on me. I can control myself, my thoughts, my actions. And beyond that, it’s not about me.”
On the day Hoppus found out about his cancer, he texted Barker the news, as well as Skiba. By coincidence, after a few weeks of not really talking, DeLonge hit up Hoppus randomly. “The way the universe works is strange because I reached out to Mark because I needed him to sign this piece of paper that had to do with my divorce,” DeLonge said in a recent interview. “Only because of that call did I learn he had cancer. And he told me on the phone. I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ ” Hoppus added: “Tom sent me a picture of him in front of these women in his video shoot and they were all in lingerie. He texted me like, ‘Hope you’re doing good. I’m over here making art!’ And that’s when I told him.”
In any case, DeLonge would soon visit Hoppus’s house, and because the universe works in strange ways, Barker happened to be there as well. “I didn’t know Travis was going to show up,” DeLonge said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, shit, band meeting!’ ”
The three of them sat in Hoppus’s backyard for hours, opening their hearts up to one another, talking about everything. DeLonge went deep about his father’s death and the metaphysics of the universe and learning to heal. They talked about old wounds within the band and the scars they’ve accumulated along the way. For all the dick jokes and toilet humor, the trio have experienced their share of darkness. Notably, in 2008, Barker was in a plane crash that killed four people but spared him and his friend Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein. They survived but at a cost: Barker was instilled with a severe fear of flying and Goldstein died of an accidental drug overdose just a year after the accident. (Shortly after their meeting in Hoppus’s backyard, in August, Barker flew for the first time in over a decade when he went to Cabo San Lucas with his fiancé, Kourtney.)
The conversation that day was, for each of them, a salve. “We got into more life stuff. What we’ve learned over the years about ourselves. How we’ve grown, how nothing really matters when it boils down to what we were dealing with in that moment,” said DeLonge. “And so, it wasn’t some big meeting about Blink-182, it was more about brothers meeting and saying, ‘How do we support Mark?’ ”
The morning I met Hoppus at his home happened to be a day removed from some rare good news. “Just saw my oncologist and I’m cancer free!!” he’d written on Instagram 24 hours earlier, this time purposefully. “Thank you God and universe and friends and family and everyone who sent support and kindness and love.”
The chemotherapy cycle had worked—just like it worked for his mother. “She’s been my greatest resource this whole time,” said Hoppus, collecting himself. “Nobody knows what it’s like except somebody who’s gone through chemotherapy. And so being able to talk to my mom and just be like, ‘I feel shitty today. I feel really awful,’ and have her be able to say, ‘I know what you mean. I’ve had those days as well….’ ”
Hoppus still isn’t quite sure what tomorrow holds, exactly. But who is? He hasn’t really thought about what Blink-182 might look like now that he’s cancer-free, but he’s open to any permutation of the band, really, including lineups with Tom back in the fold. “We haven’t really talked about that, but I’m open to anything in the future,” said Hoppus. “I don’t know how that would work if it’s all four of us. Like we’re all going to live in the same house again?”
Hearing Mark, Tom, and Travis all talk about each other, you get a real sense that there’s a deep affection there, annoyances and all, loving one another as only brothers can. (“There is nobody with better dick jokes than us,” added DeLonge.) For Hoppus, the past year not only deepened his appreciation for his family and friends, but it taught him how to handle unexpected horror with humility, grace, humor, and—this is the new one—an open heart that’s still learning how to feel deserving. “I’m totally overwhelmed with the support and love,” he said, pausing. “I don’t know. People online I have never met sending support. Cancer survivors of the same lymphoma that I had even put together a video where they covered a Blink song, and it made me cry.” That song, of course, was “All the Small Things.”
Before I left, Hoppus wanted me to take a close look at the top of his head. He was excited: His hair was showing tiny signs of growth. Of returning to normalcy. “My armpit hair is still totally gone,” he said, “but if you look close, all this white hair is just the shitty cancer hair, and then you can see the actual dark hair growing back in a little bit.”
You got a free bleach job, I joked.
“I know,” he replied, beaming. “I wish I’d had this in the mid-’90s.”
Chris Gayomali is a GQ articles editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2022 issue with the title “Well I Guess This Is Growing Up.”