Actor-director Colin Hanks was about 7 years old when Splash came out in 1984, the movie that starred his father Tom Hanks and John Candy; it would be a major hit for the emerging stars. The younger Hanks, director of the documentary John Candy: I Like Me, which just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, still recalls spending time with Candy.
“I do have very vivid memories of a lot of exchanges with John, which I think is really a testament to the kind of person he was,” Hanks told us when he stopped by Deadline’s Toronto studio, along with John Candy’s son Christopher and his daughter Jennifer Candy-Sullivan. Hanks observed, “He would even make a 7-year-old kid feel important and special.”
Macaulay Culkin and John Candy in ‘Uncle Buck’
(c)Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
In the film, Macaulay Culkin, who starred with Candy in Uncle Buck, also recalls the actor making a concerted effort to check on his well-being.
“When we hear about Macaulay Culkin, that doesn’t surprise me because that’s who our dad was,” Candy-Sullivan affirmed. “He wasn’t going to just kind of ignore a kid because he was a kid actor and he was moving on to something else. It’s like he genuinely wanted to know.”
“The fact that John took that time to check in with Mac and make sure that he was doing okay, I related to that, having experienced it myself,” Hanks added. “John was like that with everybody. He was like that with the people that he worked with. He was like that with the people that he met on the street. John made you feel important. He made you feel heard, and that was really a unique quality.”
John Candy, 1950-1994
Patti Gower/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Candy’s sensitivity toward other people’s feelings stood in contrast to the treatment he often received from interviewers. In an archive clip, one of them asks him “why everyone loves a fat man.” Candy says of comments like those, “It hurt sometimes.”
“That took me back. Like when I was watching all of the interviews, they’re intense,” Candy-Sullivan said. “Some of them I was like, ‘Wow, people were ruthless back then…’ They were thinking, ‘Oh, it’s okay. I’m going to say it in such a sweet way that you’re not going to be offended.’ But the look on his face, you’re just like, ‘Wow. That was a backhanded compliment there.’ You’re just, ‘I can’t believe some people would say that.’”
Candy died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 43. Along with Splash and Uncle Buck, he is beloved for his roles in Stripes; Armed and Dangerous with Eugene Levy; Spaceballs, directed by Mel Brooks; Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Steve Martin, a classic directed by John Hughes; Cool Runnings, and of course SCTV. There are many funny moments in the film, as well as poignant ones. John Candy: I Like Me explores the bouts of anxiety the actor suffered later in life and the effort he was making to deal with them.
“I think that we always knew that he was in treatment and therapy in the last years of his life,” Christopher Candy noted. “I really feel like he was at the beginning phases of turning a lot around and he just didn’t have the time, and the elements weren’t lined up. But I wanted to make sure that message got across because I wanted people to know that he was brave and curious enough to begin to do that exploration on himself.”
John Candy: I Like Me will launch worldwide on the Prime Video streaming platform on October 10.
Watch the full conversation in the video above. In it, John Candy’s kids share their favorite scenes from movies their dad made.
The Deadline Studio at TIFF is hosted at Bisha Hotel and sponsored by Cast & Crew and Final Draft.
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