“I can’t believe some people would say that,” says Candy’s daughter Jennifer, as she talks about her dad with brother Christopher and ‘John Candy: I Like Me’ director Colin Hanks, covering everything from looking out for Macaulay Culkin to how he was trying to reclaim life at the end.
As Colin Hanks’ new documentary, John Candy: I Like Me, hits the Toronto International Film Festival, people are looking back at the comedic actor’s career and life, which includes looking back at how he was treated in the media.
Candy was always a larger man, but it was his big heart that those who knew him best remember about him. As for his stature, that was a part of who he was, but not necessarily something he was comfortable with, according to his children.
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Christopher Candy and Jennifer Candy-Sullivan were on hand at TIFF, alongside director Hanks, where they opened up about their father’s life, including his struggles, and how looking back at some of those press encounters he endured through today’s lens feels.
In one clip from the film, one interviewer asked him “why everyone loves a fat man.” Christopher told Deadline that comments like that “hurt sometimes,” as Jennifer called looking back at those interview clips “intense.”
“Some of them I was like, ‘Wow, people were ruthless back then,'” she said. “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.'”
While Candy usually laughed off comments and jokes about his size, Jennifer said that the truth was right there. “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,'” she said.
Candy’s children also weighed in on comments made by Macaulay Culkin about their father’s kindness, checking in on him during their work together on Uncle Buck.
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“I think he always had that really great instinct,” Culkin says in the film. “I think he saw. Listen, even before the wave crested and the Home Alone stuff was happening, it was not hard to see how difficult my father was. It was no secret. He was already a monster.”
“When we hear about Macaulay Culkin, that doesn’t surprise me because that’s who our dad was,” Jennifer said. “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.”
Director Hanks, who is the son of Tom Hanks, said that he had vivid memories of Candy from his own childhood, sharing that it was because the actor had a way of making every kid “feel important and special.”
In the film, Culkin describes that energy as “a testament to the kind of man he was,” adding that Candy “was just looking out for” him. “It doesn’t happen that often. It actually happened less as time went on. I wish I got more of that in my life. It’s important that I remember that. I remember John caring when not a lot of people did.”
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Hanks told Deadline that he experienced that same kind of care and attentiveness himself with Candy. “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,” he added. “John made you feel important. He made you feel heard, and that was really a unique quality.”
Even as he was checking in on everyone else, the actor, who died at the age of 43 in 1994, was struggling himself, dealing with bouts of anxiety, according to the film. But Christopher said that his father was working hard to deal with it through “treatment and therapy in the last years of his life.”
“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,” he said. “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 drops October 10 on Prime Video.
