Comedian Jeff Arcuri and wife Katie Thurston’s plans to start a family feel even more meaningful in the wake of her stage IV breast cancer diagnosis.
“It has so much more weight to it now because we have the presence of — not death, but something very dark happening — and then, on the other end of that, we’re talking about creating life. So there is a beauty to the contrast of that, I think, and I like to focus on that, on the positives, on what we’re going to be doing,” Arcuri, 38, exclusively tells Us while promoting his comedy special, Nice to Meet You, streaming now on Netflix.
Arcuri adds that he knows — without a doubt — that Thurston, 35, is going to “kill it” as a mom when the day finally comes.
“She’s such a natural mama bear to everybody that she meets and I’m excited to see her be a mom. I’m incredibly excited for that,” he shares.
Arcuri says he’s also looking forward to being a dad.
“I make friends with kids in public — that sounds bad, but I love making a kid laugh,” he explains. “You could give me 100 fully grown adults, but if I make one kid do like that real laugh — that, like, stupid … if I juggle something and it falls … and they [go], ‘AH HAHAHA’ — that’s worth 10,000 adult laughs to me. So I want a kid because I want another audience. That’s all I need.”
Thurston and Arcuri tied the knot in March 2025, just weeks after the Bachelorette alum received her diagnosis. She immediately dedicated two weeks to starting her IVF journey before undergoing treatments that would likely impact her future fertility.
“I experienced a range of emotions over the past two weeks. Despair. Anger. Sadness. Denial. And then strength. Purposeful. Ready. I cried a lot,” Thurston wrote via Instagram in February 2025.
Weeks after revealing her diagnosis, Thurston shared that her cancer was reclassified as stage IV after spreading to her liver. She underwent a double mastectomy in April.
Arcuri shared an update on Thurston’s IVF journey during his July 21 episode of the “Off the Vine” podcast, revealing they have “two embryos.”
While speaking to Us, Arcuri says his Netflix special also served as a type of “therapy” amid Thurston’s cancer battle.
“I needed to talk about it as a form of therapy almost on stage, and bringing it to people, and I think there’s something kind of unique about the special in that sense — 80 percent of that special was written within the past year, so you’re getting a much more close version of that,” he says.
Arcuri also reveals Thurston has maintained her sense of humor throughout her health journey.
“She’s so funny. She’s always finding the funny in stuff, and her sense of humor is unscathed,” he adds. “If anything, it’s been sharpened. She makes dark jokes a lot, and it catches me off guard sometimes. And I truly love it, though, because she’s taking the power back. She’s not saying, ‘Hey, I don’t like to talk about my cancer, my mortality, because it makes me uncomfortable” — she’s saying, ‘If we talk about it, it doesn’t become as scary.’ It becomes something that we can talk about, and she’s very open about talking about that.”
Arcuri continues, “That’s something she’s taught me too — is that if I have a fear or if I have something I’m worried about with her health, if I hold it in, it’s not going to do any better. But if I go, ‘Hey, I’m actually scared about this,’ and I talk to her about it and just be open, I feel oftentimes way better about it. I don’t need to hide behind, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t talk about this right now.’ So, with humor, we can open up the conversation a little bit more about it, and I love that.”
Nice To Meet You premiered on July 7 and debuted in the top 10 globally.
