It’s only been half an hour since Alea O’Shea arrived at the sun-soaked studio in marie claire’s Sydney offices, but the 25-year-old hasn’t stopped to catch a breath. Before the photographer has finished setting up the lighting, Alea has already covered off her favourite Rhode beauty products, the best nightclubs in her hometown of Sydney’s shire and biggest icks.
But, when I ask her to share her story for a behind-the-scenes video, she is uncharacteristically lost for words. “How do I say ‘Hi, I’m Alea, I’m an actor and content creator… and I also have brain cancer?’”
It’s a sentence that has felt foreign in Alea’s mouth ever since her diagnosis in November last year. And while she doesn’t want to be defined by her cancer, she understands that it’s an important story to share. The first warning sign that something was very wrong arrived on a spring morning in October.
“I noticed that my smile was crooked, and it felt harder to talk and get my words out,” she recalls. “I had a few migraines as well, but nothing too scary.”
The timing was not ideal: she was days away from a dream trip to Los Angeles that had been on her vision board for more than a year. Not wanting to ruin her travel plans, she decided to push aside her worries and focus her mind on the upcoming trip.
The first few days in LA were a whirlwind of Californian heat and glamorous parties. So, when Alea woke up on her friend’s couch with a tingling sensation in two fingers, she put it down to a hectic schedule and a bad night’s sleep.
“I told myself it was a pinched nerve and that I’d see my physio when I got home,” she says. But on the plane home, things got worse. She was in agony with stomach pain and started to feel very ill. Alea was admitted to the hospital with a kidney infection caused by an untreated UTI.
“I mentioned the loss of sensation in my fingers to the doctors, but they were too focused on treating my current infection,” she explains. She was discharged a week later, but the numbness in her fingers had spread to her big toe. Putting it down to a trapped nerve, she went to her physiotherapist for help. A couple of quick tests revealed something was very wrong and she was advised to return to the hospital for a brain scan.
“The doctors confirmed that there was something on my brain, but I had the neurology team telling me, ‘We think it’s a tumour,’ and the infection team saying, ‘We think it’s brain syphilis.’ I’ve never wanted brain syphilis more in my life,” she says.
On her 25th birthday, Alea underwent a biopsy, which confirmed the worst: she had brain cancer. What followed was six weeks of oral chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a heavy dose of cancer medication. “I feel like I only started processing the whole thing a few weeks ago,” she says. “The drugs and their side effects have been harder than the treatment. I was in a bit of drug-induced mania.”
Right now, she is waiting for a follow-up MRI, which will determine the next course of action. Watching Alea on set, it’s difficult to comprehend the enormous physical and emotional toll the past few months have taken.
There were mornings when her legs were paralysed. Her arm is paralysed, so her childhood friend, Portia, helps her wriggle into a glamorous brown coat. “It’s got a mind of its own this thing,” she adds, laughing when her arm lifts unexpectedly. “I haven’t yet come to terms with the fact I’m disabled at 25. [My sickness] is kind of invisible. Navigating that is new to me.”
Being on set is Alea’s first love. After making her debut on Home and Away at 12, she starred in a string of hit series, including Netflix thriller Riverdale alongside Lili Reinhart and Cole Sprouse in 2021 and Australian crime drama Underbelly in 2022.
While her diagnosis has forced her to take a temporary step back from acting, in March her new independent horror film, Dead Eyes, premiered at South by Southwest in Texas. It took a lot of planning and clearance from her doctors to get Alea to the US, but she was determined not to miss it.
The film was shot in 2024 in rural Queensland and follows a man searching for his missing father, only to encounter terrifying creatures and confront unsettling questions about life and death. Alea plays Kate, a friend joining in on the search. “[Seeing myself pre-diagnosis on the screen in Texas, I thought] ‘Damn, my jawline looked that good!’” she says with a laugh. “No, but in all seriousness, seeing my younger self, I felt lucky that I’ve spent the past 25 years doing everything I’ve wanted to do.
There were times during the filming of Dead Eyes when I was so tired and getting bitten by bugs but, looking back, I’m just so glad that I said yes to so many things because you never know what’s gonna happen.”
Oral radiotherapy caused Alea to lose only parts of her hair, leaving her with what she describes as a “Skrillex fade” hairstyle. One night, unable to sleep in her hospital bed, she began looking into solutions.
She didn’t need a full wig but wasn’t sure if there was anything else out there. “Being a young person, you place a lot more emphasis on your appearance, which might sound superficial, but – as a cancer patient – having any part of yourself that feels normal in the chaos is everything. I came across Tammy Lobato, who seemed to be the only person in Sydney who made bonded wigs, which are these semi-permanent hair pieces you can attach directly to the scalp,” she explains, lifting up her hair to demonstrate. “While I was getting my treatment, I was sitting with all these ladies and telling them about bonded wigs, but nobody knew what they were.”
With prices typically ranging from $4000 to $6000, these wigs are often out of reach for women already navigating the financial and emotional toll of treatment; something Alea is determined to change. In January, she launched her non-profit, the CEARE Wig Fund, in partnership with Tammy, to help Australian woman access bonded wigs during medical hair loss. Alea has been raising funds through donations and also offering freelance content editing for social media, with all proceeds going directly to CEARE.
She has already raised enough money to fund the first wig. While Alea has a lot of big ideas in the pipeline for CEARE, for now she is leaning into the positives that have come out of her diagnosis.
“Being diagnosed with cancer really forced me to slow down,” she says. “I’ve always been type A, a workaholic, and I was very hard on myself. In a weird way, when I first got the diagnosis, I felt a weight off my shoulders that now all I had to do was keep myself healthy. There’s this weird sense of freedom where you’re like, nothing really matters. At the very beginning of my cancer journey, I came across this quote that said, ‘Cancer killed the old me, but I’m not sure I liked her that much anyway.’ I think there’s some truth in that.”
To find out more about CEARE or to make a donation, visit gofundme.com/f/ceare-wig-fund- supporting-women-through-medical-hair-loss.
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