By all accounts, John Candy was such a decent and kind person that when Colin Hanks set out to direct the definitive documentary about his life and career, he knew there wouldn’t be any “dirt” to uncover. In the words of Candy’s friend Bill Murray, “I wish I had some more bad things to say about him.” But John Candy: I Like Me (streaming now on Amazon Prime Video) does explore the beloved comic actor’s many personal demons.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Hanks breaks down why he wanted to make a film about Candy, including his personal connection to the comedy star through his father, Tom Hanks, and their shared struggles with issues of anxiety and mortality. Hanks discusses his heartbreaking interview with Macaulay Culkin, reveals the piece of archival footage he was most excited to uncover, and later, discusses his own journey from teen actor to filmmaker—including his first-ever response to the “nepo baby” discourse.
“I definitely felt like there should be a John Candy documentary that exists,” Hanks says. So when producer Ryan Reynolds approached him to direct it, he was immediately intrigued. “But it wasn’t until I was able to speak with his children, Chris and Jennifer, and really understand the struggles that he had, that it seemed like a good story to tell.”
The film Hanks ended up making begins with Candy’s good friend and one-time roommate Murray warning the director that the lack of negative feelings around the comedy icon, who died of a heart attack at 43, might make for a less-than-compelling watch.
“I knew that the documentary just couldn’t be just a laundry list of, here are all the movies that he made, and he was a great guy,” Hanks says, noting that the “hidden demons” in documentaries about celebrities who died too young tend to involve drugs or alcohol. “But it turns out that his struggle was much more common than we all realized,” he adds, mainly involving an intense fear about his own mortality and a sometimes debilitating anxiety that he expertly concealed with his affable on-screen persona.
Candy’s weight—at one point more than 375 pounds—was less something that he struggled with and more of an issue for everyone else, as we see in archival footage of the shockingly offensive questions he would regularly field from interviewers.
“I was really blown away by how uncomfortable John was in his interviews, especially the early ones,” Hanks says. “It was just an onslaught of frankly, really horrible things, that people are asking him in the form of, isn’t this a fun interview? There was something about that that was just so heartbreaking and crushing, and hopefully it gives the audience an understanding of the kind of thing that John was constantly coming up against in his career, but more importantly in his life. This is something that really affected him.”
The clips of Candy awkwardly dodging questions about efforts to lose weight are especially striking given how much effortless charisma he displayed in his film roles. He was known for being unflappable, so this more vulnerable Candy is someone most people will have never seen before. “I just assumed that the happy-go-lucky John Candy that I remember in my mind from the movies would be the happy-go-lucky John Candy in interviews,” Hanks says. “And that wasn’t the case.”
Colin Hanks was just six years old when he met Candy, who was playing the brother of his dad, Tom Hanks’ character, in 1984’s Splash. “As a kid, John made me feel important, he made me feel, seen, heard, understood,” he says, echoing the way his contemporary Macaulay Culkin speaks in the doc about working with Candy on Uncle Buck at just eight years old.
But his personal connections to the comedy legend go much deeper than that.
Like Candy, Hanks lost a parent at a young age. His mother Samantha Hewes, the first wife of Tom Hanks, died of bone cancer in 2002 at just 49 years old. Colin, in his mid-20s then, is now 47 and hyper-aware that he will soon be older than his mother ever was. This common fixation for people who lose parents young also plagued Candy, whose father died of a heart attack at 35 when John was just 5 years old.
“It’s always been on my mind the closer and closer I get to that age, just because I don’t feel that age, and that age seemed so distant when I was younger,” Hanks says. “And to think that I am getting to the point where I’ve lived the same amount of time that my mom lived, there’s something about that that just doesn’t compute.” Learning that Candy was just starting to really grapple with those same feelings in the years before his own untimely death made Hanks feel even more connected to the star who he met when he was a kid.
Hanks also seems to have a chip on his shoulder about the “nepo baby” conversation that would follow any actor with a two-time Oscar winner for a father.
“You know, no one has actually asked me about it, so this is the first, but I will tell you right now, I have absolutely zero interest in contributing to that conversation,” Hanks says with an edge in his voice. “While I think some of the points may be structurally valid, I don’t agree with the tone of it. And overall, I just think, alright, I’m 47 years old, you wanna call me a baby? Come say to me directly.”
Granted, it can’t be easy living up to the legacy of Tom Hanks and during the course of our conversation, Colin Hanks lists off just some of the auditions he regrets turning down out of fear the material wasn’t serious enough, including The Devil Wears Prada and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. At the same time, he says, “I wanted the role in Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium more than you could possibly imagine and I was devastated when I did not get that role.”
Unlike Tom Hanks, Candy never made the leap from comedy to drama—though his undeniable acting chops were apparent, especially in the devastating Planes, Trains and Automobiles monologue that gives the documentary its title.
The Academy rarely recognizes comedic performances, and that was certainly the case for Candy, who won two Emmy Awards for writing the cult classic SCTV sketch show, but was never even nominated for an Oscar.
Hanks believes that “without a doubt,” comedy does not get the recognition it deserves from the Academy. “But this is the thing about John, right?” he says. “Everyone that remembers John, they remember how funny he was, and they remember how John made them feel. It wasn’t just that he was funny. When you talk with people, they don’t say they thought John was so funny. They all say, ‘I love John Candy.’ That’s because he was truly an actor. There was a specificity to everything that he did that I think really landed with people.”
“And it is why, 31 years later, we’re talking about him now, because he was that good,” Hanks continues. “It’s a shame that people don’t look at comedy the exact same way as they do the big, dramatic, quote unquote ‘important’ pieces. But as the old saying goes: Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
The post The Hidden Demons That Haunted John Candy Until the End appeared first on The Daily Beast.
