Colin Hanks Can’t Believe the ‘Horrible Things’ Interviewers Said to John Candy About His Weight

John Candy is one of the all-time greatest comedic performers and Canada’s foremost cultural export, but, for some reason, the first thing that some journalists wanted to talk about when they were blessed with his presence was his waist.

Tonight, Colin Hanks’ documentary film John Candy: I Like Me premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Candy’s countrymen will relive his historic career and see inside the private life of the Uncle Buck and Planes, Trains & Automobiles star. As Hanks will tell you, Candy’s impact on North American entertainment simply can’t be measured – unlike his weight, on which the entertainment media of the 1980s and early 1990s hyper-fixated in their coverage of the comedy legend. 

Candy died of heart failure at the age of 43, and, as Hanks examines in John Candy: I Like Me, Candy’s anxieties about his health were a running theme throughout his life. Sadly, the casual cruelty of commonplace fatphobia during Candy’s time at the top of the comedy business likely didn’t help the issue, and, as Hanks discussed during a recent talk with Variety, the way reporters spoke to and about Candy and his body will be deeply upsetting to audiences of today.

It's funny how nobody wants to watch a documentary about a judgmental entertainment journalist, no matter how thin they are.

During the interview, Hanks described the grief that Candy carried with him throughout his father after losing his father to heart disease at 4 years old. Candy's father was just 43. “This idea of borrowed time combined with the nature of show business, which is go, go, go, go, moving at the speed of opportunity," Hanks said of how the death of Candy's father shaped the comedian's outlook on his own life. "Those things came together to create this perpetual motion machine for John that made things incredibly hectic and stressful and added to that general sense of anxiety.”

Tragically, Candy had to deal with constant reminders of his own weight throughout his career, and John Candy: I Like Me includes numerous instances of entertainment media members callously and shamelessly insulting towards Candy about his size. “You look at interview after interview and horrible things are being said and questions are being asked in incredibly insensitive ways,” Hanks said of how the media treated Candy. 

“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,” Hanks commented.

The producer of John Candy: I Like Me, Ryan Reynolds, had a similar reaction to watching old clips of Candy smiling through deeply disturbing and insulting interviews. “We could have made an entire movie just of journalists saying things to and about him that were unreal—even posthumously,” Reynolds recently told Toronto Life, “I interpreted a certain amount of pain in his eyes when a journalist said something along the lines of, ‘In case you don’t know what the word giant means, look at who I’m interviewing.’”

“John didn’t make fat jokes. He didn’t lean in to that. But I think he did get the sense that, at least in the eyes of some of his employers, that’s where his value lay,” Reynolds continued, “And so you end up farming out your self-worth. And I think that John was swallowed by a compulsion that can happen in Hollywood and in show business, particularly coming from Canada, to over-deliver and never let anyone down.”

Tragically, it's show business that ended up letting down Candy.