Olivia Munn used a special moment of recognition to thank two people who helped her along her breast cancer journey.

While accepting the Trailblazer Award at the Hollywood Creative Alliance’s Astra TV Awards on June 10, the Your Friends & Neighbors star, 44, called attention to “two people from our community that helped me many times personally and professionally who we sadly lost to cancer”: her late agent, Tony Etz, and late actress Shannen Doherty.

Munn described Etz as “incredibly kind and easygoing while at the same time being a beast for his clients,” and she recognized Doherty for helping “me through the steps in the early days of my diagnosis” in 2023.

“Shannen was a close friend and in this room of her peers, I know we all believe Shannen — as Brenda Walsh — is, was, and will always be an icon,” she said. “I just want to say thank you to all the people that have made my work so rewarding and my voice heard.”

Earlier in her speech, Munn said that being “able to speak out about the issues that matter to me, the things that hit my heart” has been “the great surprise of my career.”

“Two years ago when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had gotten past the biggest parts of the battle, I had a moment to think about what my journey could mean to other women, and I knew then that I wanted to share my story,” she said. “I’m so grateful that I had established enough voice to urge women to get the breast cancer lifetime risk assessment test and hopefully save a life as my doctor had saved mine.”

Munn also reflected on her early career, including her first job in entertainment working as an intern at Fox Sports.

“We were told as interns to never go up to the third or fifth floor, I can’t remember, but it was the executive suite floor. So, being me, I immediately did,” Munn said. “I would walk around, I’d peek my head into different offices looking for someone sitting at their desk, and eventually I wandered into the office of the Vice President of College Football and said, ‘Hi, I’m an intern, and I’d like a job.’ And he was so flabbergasted that I was just wandering around introducing myself that he said, ‘What do you want to do with your career?’ And I said, ‘I want to be a sports commentator who also stars on a soap opera.'”

“He literally fell out of his chair laughing at me,” Munn continued. “So, obviously as I stand here tonight having failed to achieve either of those goals, I have asked my agents repeatedly to line up a soap opera during the day, sideline reporter at night job for me, and they say it isn’t a thing. But in lieu of that, I have been lucky enough to work with people like [Aaron] Sorkin, Jon Stewart, Liz Merriwether, Steven Soderbergh, and now Jonathan Tropper, Jon Hamm, and all of my incredible friends and co-stars on Your Friends & Neighbors.”

While introducing Munn, whom he worked with on his HBO drama The Newsroom, at the event, Sorkin recalled a time when a director reached out to him asking for his thoughts on her. He told the director, “You should hire her.”

“I don’t know what the role is. It could be King Lear. It doesn’t matter. You should hire her,” Sorkin recalled saying. “She’s a sharpshooter. She has rock solid technique and two things an actor can’t fake: She’s smart, and she’s funny.”

Sorkin went on to tell the director “you have eyes, so I don’t need to tell you that she’s beautiful, but part of her charm comes from the fact that she always seems to be the only one in the room who doesn’t know that her character looks like Olivia Munn.”

“She quickly became a fan and company favorite,” he said. “You’ll be floored by her work, and you’ll be proud of your own. You should hire her.’”

Since April, Munn has been filming season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors in New York.

Munn recently told PEOPLE that she flies back and forth every two days when her schedule allows to be with her husband John Mulaney and their two kids Malcolm, 3, and Méi, 8 months, in Los Angeles, and she never goes more than two weeks away from the family.

“It’s a dance right now with our schedules,” Munn said. “We make it work simply because we have the mindset that it’s a blessing.”

Your Friends & Neighbors is streaming now on Apple TV+.