John Candy Came Shockingly Close to Starring in ‘Goodfellas’
More than 30 years after his tragic death, John Candy remains one of the most beloved movie stars of all-time, having appeared in comedy classics like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Spaceballs, Home Alone, Uncle Buck, The Great Outdoors and National Lampoon’s Vacation, just to name a few.
What do all of those movies have in common? Well, for one thing, none of them involved Candy beating people to death with a baseball bat. Which makes it all the more surprising to learn that Candy came surprisingly close to starring in Martin Scorsese’s blood-soaked, cocaine-riddled mob movie masterpiece Goodfellas.
Candy’s son, Christopher Candy, recently spoke with Hats Off Entertainment in order to promote the upcoming documentary John Candy: I Like Me. During the chat, he discussed some of his father’s famous “lost roles,” including Ghostbusters’ Louis Tully (which ultimately went to his SCTV co-star Rick Moranis) and a rumored take on Ignatius J. Reilly in one of several doomed adaptations of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
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Candy was also considered for at least two ultraviolent crime movies. “He got sent the script of Pulp Fiction, which would have been bizarre,” Christopher Candy revealed, adding that “the one that his driver told me about was that he was up to be in Goodfellas, and he screen tested for it.”
“There’s footage of him looking like a tough kind of gangster guy,” Christopher Candy continued. “Those were shockers for me when I was going through it, going like ‘Woah, that would have been a completely different John Candy.’”
It’s unclear which role exactly Candy was up for but it certainly would have altered the trajectory of the Summer Rental star’s career had he been able to show off his dramatic chops in a Scorsese movie. Keep in mind, Goodfellas came out just one year after Candy was beating up birthday party clowns in Uncle Buck — which, come to think of it, was also a movie about a mobster.
Scorsese wanting Candy for Goodfellas may seem shocking, considering his mostly comedic filmography (although he did briefly appear in Oliver Stone's conspiracy theory drama JFK). But this revelation actually makes a lot of sense, considering that the Raging Bull director famously adores SCTV. He even filmed a cast reunion in 2018 for a Netflix documentary that, sadly, never materialized.
And Scorsese is such a fan of the Canadian sketch series that he literally broke U.S. law in an effort to hire Catherine O’Hara for a small part in 1985’s After Hours.
Ironically, while Candy wasn’t cast in Goodfellas, his SCTV buddy Moranis went on to star in its unofficial sequel.
