John Candy’s son, Chris, said during a recent event promoting the new documentary “John Candy: I Like Me” (via People) that it was “heart-wrenching” to see resurfaced press interviews in the film where journalists openly mocked Candy’s weight to his face.
“I was kind of shocked to see how interviewers treat him,” Chris said. “That was just kind of heart-wrenching. And I also could see how he got more frustrated and he found ways to deal with that… I learned through the process of this [documentary] that he was so nervous about eating in front of people because of paparazzi. He developed a poor eating habit where he’d be like, ‘Alright, well I’m not going to eat all day. I’m going to eat at night.’”
Chris continued, “When I hear stories like that I just felt so bad for him because it’s like, ‘How cornered are you?’ And you really want in those moments, as his son or as his friend, to be able to grab him by his shoulders and say, ‘Why the fuck do you have to do this? Just who cares? Have a sandwich and get mad about it.’”
“John Candy: I Like Me” hails from director Colin Hanks and producer Ryan Reynolds. The movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before making its streaming debut Oct. 10 on Amazon Prime Video, contains many examples of interviewers essentially calling Candy “fat” to his face during press junkets.
“You look at interview after interview and horrible things are being said and questions are being asked in incredibly insensitive ways,” Hanks told Variety before the film’s TIFF premiere. “It’s tough to see how uncomfortable John was in almost every clip. And he had good reason, because some of the things that people said were disgusting and would not be tolerated today.”
Reynolds revealed during a Q&A at TIFF that he personally called one of the journalists who mocked Candy‘s weight after seeing archival footage of the insulting incident while working on the documentary as a producer.
“There was a lot of things we left out of the documentary, journalists just saying stuff. One of them I called,” Reynolds said about the journalist who was caught on camera making inflammatory comments about Candy’s weight. “I didn’t put it in the movie, but I called this journalist just to see.”
“I wasn’t trying to shame him or teach him a lesson,” Reynolds continued. “[I told him] I took it out of the movie, but I’d put it in the movie if you wanted to talk about it, because maybe you have something to say about it, about your journey whenever it comes to something like that. We had such a thoughtful conversation about it.”
“John Candy: I Like Me” includes interviews with dozens of the late comedian’s former co-stars, including Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O’Hara. The movie is now streaming on Prime Video.
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