Funny Business

Ryan Reynolds makes even the multi-est of hyphenates look lazy. The actor, writer, producer, advertising CEO, football club owner, booze baron, telecom tycoon and philanthropist has spent the past decade with his finger in every conceivable pie—and that’s not including his role as Hollywood husband to Blake Lively and father of four (we won’t even get into his extrafamilial legal headaches). Yes, he is aware that he probably needs to get better at saying no, but just look at where saying yes has gotten him. Decades ago, the tension between taking on more and letting things go is what drove another comedy great: John Candy, the subject of Reynolds’s latest project.

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The idea to make a documentary about Candy—who stayed true to his Canadian roots even as he became one of the biggest stars on the planet—came out of Reynolds’s own fandom. He grew up watching Uncle Buck and National Lampoon’s Vacation, and all three of his Deadpool movies are dotted with easter eggs from the Candy classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles. When Reynolds’s creative agency, Maximum Effort, released a montage of film clips on the 25th anniversary of Candy’s death, people went wild, and Reynolds knew just what to do next. Signing on as executive producer, he got Colin Hanks—the son of Candy’s Splash co-star Tom—onboard as director, and the result is set to open TIFF’s 50th-anniversary edition this month. Here, Reynolds talks about the power of collective joy, the things that make him cry and the importance of disappointing at least one person a day.

When one Canadian entertainment icon produces a documentary about another and it opens the 50th edition of TIFF, I think we call that a CanCon hat trick. This movie couldn’t not premiere in Canada. If TIFF weren’t happening, we would have done it on John Candy Day, which is October 31, his birthday. He would have turned 75 this year. John was distinctly Canadian. Like me, he was really proud of where he came from and understood that his Canadianness was an advantage in this business. It gave him a kind of self-effacing humour where he didn’t take himself too seriously.

What makes John Candy: I Like Me the right pick to launch this year’s festival? Joy is a scarce resource in the world right now, and John represented joy—in his work, in his life. John was a good person even when nobody was watching. One of the things we kept hearing when reaching out to potential interview subjects was, “That’s not going to be an interesting project. He’s unimpeachable.” This was a man who was an engine of joy, someone you can’t think about without smiling. We live in a huge hate tank, and I think there’s a yearning for togetherness, to experience what the French sociologist Émile Durk­heim called “collective effervescence”—where we sit together in a room and we all feel the same thing in the same moment, and it’s meaningful because we may be divided in every other sense.

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“If Planes, Trains and Automobiles were released today, John Candy would be nominated for an Oscar”

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Do you remember your first John Candy experience?
Uncle Buck was probably the first. No, wait, it was National Lampoon’s Vacation, where Candy plays the security guard at Walley World. In the doc, we talk about how he was brought in late during the shoot, after the original ending didn’t test well, and how that speaks to his talent. But the reason I related to John so strongly is more intimate. It had a lot to do with my older brother, who did not have it easy. He was a big kid, like John was, and he took a lot of arrows. Everyone thought they could do that because it didn’t look so bad to attack the big guy. Every fight I got into as a kid had to do with coming to my brother’s defence. I projected a lot of that onto John, so initially I saw him as this sad clown in pain, but that is far too broad of a brush to paint him with. He was a technical master who knew the rhythm and music required in any given moment, and he rose to that occasion in so many different ways.

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You never met him, but his work obviously had a big impact on your career and comedic sensibility. I borrow from him pretty regularly. In all the films I’ve produced and written, there are references to John Candy, most often Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The book Candy’s character, Del Griffith, reads in that movie, The Canadian Mounted, appears in all three Deadpool movies; in Deadpool & Wolverine, I walk past a burned-out car that’s similar to the Chrysler LeBaron at the centre of Planes; and in Deadpool 2, my character does a riff on Del’s famous “I like me” speech. In my own performances, particularly in the more mainstream movies, I’m always playing aspects of Del Griffith or of Neal Page, Steve Martin’s character in Planes. It’s either the exasperated, overworked straight man or the guy who accesses vulnerability so easily, which is John. It’s right there on the surface—his aura, his vibe, his id, whatever you want to call it. You can tell that the joy coming out of him—and the fun, the mischief, the kindness and an almost scientific, savant way of reading the room in a scene—is from a place of depth. If Planes were released today, he would be nominated for an Oscar.

You mentioned vulnerability. It’s not a word I associate with Deadpool. Vulnerability is what I love and what I look for, particularly in a comedic role. When I’m writing the Deadpool movies, I always rip up the first draft. With that first draft, you write a comedy, because it’s really fun to write a comedy. But it doesn’t really hold together, so you rip it up and write a drama instead, and then you add the comedy back in. You can look at Planes, for example, as a dramatic character piece—but also as a very, very funny movie.

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The doc is named after Candy’s iconic monologue and life manifesto in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, about the satisfaction of being your authentic self. Did you always know I Like Me was going to be the title? The line has stayed with me since the first time I heard it. The way it was delivered and the ease with which it can be applied to Candy’s life and his core values resonate. John was self-deprecating but never self-loathing, and when he delivers that line, it’s like an epiphany. It was the first title we came up with. Then it changed like 50 times, which was so frustrating. But you have to go through the exercise with the studio. I have a lot of respect for the people who pay for the work I get to do. There’s a tradition in Hollywood, going back to the 1970s maverick era of Easy Rider and Raging Bull, of a fuck-the-man mentality where the studio is the bad guy, but that’s not necessarily true. They took a leap of faith investing in this project, and it’s our job to be good partners. So when something like a title change is requested, you go through the exercise. And then we ended up back with John Candy: I Like Me. That’s always the way. Shortly after Disney first bought 21st Century Fox, I went to Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, and pitched him on the Deadpool & Wolverine movie. He said no for a bunch of reasons, but we got there in the end.

How did this project come together? George Dewey—my partner at Maximum Effort, our marketing agency and film production company—and I put together a tribute montage of John Candy’s work in various movies and set it to a version of the song “Every Time You Go Away” from Planes. We posted it on social media in 2019, on the 25th anniversary of John’s death, and we were shocked to see just how much of a response it garnered. That’s when we thought, We can’t believe nobody has made the definitive John Candy documentary.

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“Nostalgia is the greatest drug ever invented. It is just such a powerful thing. I watch the doc now and still sob”

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What do you think people were responding to? I think maybe it was a bereft moment. It’s a very narrow target you can hit every once in a while, where people miss somebody so desperately but don’t know they miss them. When a beloved comedy star dies, they’re almost canonized. In John’s case, the LAPD closed the 405 freeway in Los Angeles for his funeral procession, and officers stood at every ramp as the car passed. People were very affected by the loss—John Hughes, a close collaborator and friend of his, never directed another movie after Candy passed away. Then time inexorably marches forward, and you forget until you remember. I’ve loved watching the reactions of people over a certain age who have already seen the doc.

I’m from Gen X, and I spent much of the documentary bawling. It’s about the loss of this incredible talent, but as I was watching clips from movies that were part of a collective 1980s childhood experience, I was also contemplating my own lost youth. Damned if I don’t feel that too. Nostalgia is the greatest drug ever invented. It is just such a powerful thing. It’s human nature to look at the past in a golden light, with a kind of reverence. I certainly do that with my own past. I watch the doc now and still sob.

What’s the sobbiest moment for you? I think it’s the interview with Don Lake, a Canadian actor and writer who worked with John on a bunch of projects. He talks about home and about John wanting to go home while he was shooting Wagons East, which would be his last film. Again, this is my interpretation, a projection of my own feelings. I know what it’s like when you’re on a movie set far away from home and you don’t quite know why you’re there—it’s not a passion project, it’s not something you wrote. You just felt like you had to go to work, and it’s so far away, and your kids are asleep when you’re awake, and you’re awake when they’re asleep. I know that feeling exactly, and that was the feeling John had right before he died. It breaks my heart.

Candy’s size, his relationship to it and the horrible ways that people, particularly interviewers, joked about it were also pretty heartbreaking. We could have made an entire movie just of journalists saying things to and about him that were unreal—even posthumously. 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.” Chris Farley used to refer to himself as the fat-man-falls-down guy. 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. 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.

Do you relate? My aspiration when I first came to LA at 19 was to be employed. To me, even just playing the wacky neighbour of the wacky neighbour was making it. It’s such a difficult club to get into, but then when you do, you become a lunch-pail actor. You feel the pressure to keep working, keep producing. You’re already thinking, I love this job. I would do it for free. That it’s rare air and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I think John had that sensibility, which I didn’t realize before working on the doc. This mechanism pushed him to keep going and going, so he was working on all these different projects, including being a co-owner of the Toronto Argonauts. I could definitely relate to that, having farmed out my own self-worth to overfunctioning.

Macaulay Culkin starred opposite Candy in Uncle Buck and Home Alone and was very fond of him. In the doc, he talks about how Candy was one of the few adults who ever seemed to care about what he was going through. Yeah, John would ask Mac how he was doing, and Mac would give him a stock answer. Then John would turn around and try again: “No, really, how are you doing? This is a lot.” I think it was more paternal than anything Mac had experienced.

Culkin also said that, if you stick around Hollywood long enough, you either go crazy, turn into an asshole or die. Do you agree? I think Macaulay is a survivor of something extraordinary, and people who survive find a use for their pain that will often put them at odds with contentment or peace. I think he has pushed back against that as much as humanly possible. But he’s right in a lot of ways. When I think of the guys I came up with in LA, half of them are dead, a quarter of them are unaccounted for and then there are the ones who went back to their hometowns. Hollywood is a boulevard of broken dreams, to quote the Green Day song. It facilitates destructive impulses much more than good ones. Macaulay reaching the apex of fame at the age that he did isn’t something anyone should be expected to get through. I am extremely grateful that he opened up about John’s impact on him. He doesn’t do a lot of interviews.

Who else was challenging to bring onboard?
Bill Murray, obviously. An entire documentary, The Bill Murray Stories, was made about how hard it is to get in touch with him. There is a rumour that he has a fax machine, and you send him a fax with the terms of the deal and a synopsis, and then he agrees or doesn’t.

Is that what you did? No. Who has a fax machine? That’s like sending someone a laser disk. He does use more modern means of communication, but there were challenges. He uses decoys to throw people off. His outgoing message says you’ve reached a Greek shipping company. I was persistent, though. I kept leaving messages anyway. The other person who was difficult to track down was Dan Aykroyd. Nobody knew where he was.

The doc opens with the eulogy Aykroyd delivered at Candy’s funeral in 1994, which was really moving. We decided to put the death at the beginning so it didn’t become a storytelling device and the thing that we were working up to throughout the film. Dan’s eulogy was perfect—it reflected the human being who had departed. The temptation would be to think, Oh, I’m going to do a eulogy that John would love and find funny, but then you’ve made it about yourself. Instead, Dan zeroed in on the things that made John John. He speaks of him as a man who brought great joy to people, but he also speaks about him like he’s a fallen war hero. He talks about how he was strong and grand, and I just love that so much. I knew we had to track him down.

So where did you find him? I can’t tell you that! I will say that, during the period I was trying to get in touch with Dan, my wife and I were in Ontario visiting friends for a few days. We took the opportunity to travel around and see different parts of the province. It was only later that we realized we’d been 500 yards away from his house and hadn’t known it.

Conan O’Brien, another one of the interview subjects, talks about how hazardous show business is for people pleasers like Candy. You’ve described yourself as a born people pleaser. So that’s another thing you have in common? One hundred per cent. I have very close friends who are people pleasers, and I’m great at talking to them about it. But, my god, I am not able to listen to my own advice. It’s a learned thing for me—it’s Pavlovian. I was the youngest of four boys, and my dad was an ex-cop and an ex-boxer just struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. I really tried to make it easy for everybody, because I knew that was how I was going to get by, and it was going to keep me safe. I think John felt the same way. Being people pleasers is something Blake and I have in common, and we see it in our kids. When we’re dropping them off at school, we’ll say, “Disappoint one person today!”

Do they understand what you’re trying to teach them? We unpack it at home. We talk to our kids about how it’s very easy to give in to the impulse to make someone else happy because you get an immediate reward. But it’s important to take care of yourself and to maintain your own boundaries. People pleasers often get taken advantage of, and they’re beloved until they stop people-pleasing. Then people get pretty pissed off.

You’re an actor, writer and producer; you have an ad agency; you co-own two football clubs; you’re an investor in Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile; and you’re active in philanthropy—which includes your fundraising for SickKids here in Toronto. Is there a relationship between how busy you are and your people-pleasing tendencies? I need to be better at saying no. That is also a wonderful way of saying no, actually. Like, “Hey, I need to be better about saying no, even when it’s for a cause as worthwhile as the one you’re telling me about.” On the flip side, I’m not someone who has a moat of representatives around them, and that tremendous access to me is how I’ve been able to create emotional investments in people, storytelling and brands. There are so many things that people-pleasing has given me. I’m saying that with a giggle because I’m thinking about Wrexham, the Welsh football team I co-own. That entire journey isn’t something I would have done if I were adamant about saying no to things. In that sense, people-pleasing has brought me to a lot of good things, like Grace Bowen.

Grace Bowen was a nine-year-old girl from Cobourg, Ontario, who had osteosarcoma. You met her in 2014, the year before she died, when she attended the ceremony for your induction into Canada’s Walk of Fame. Grace changed my life. I can see her face perfectly when I blink. I don’t know what it was about her, but it almost feels like her mission was to harness the power and reach of someone like me, to draw them from rest to effort. And, wow, did she ever do that. We hugged, and I remember thinking, Okay, for the rest of my life, I will never say no to the people going through this. Before that moment, I had done some work with SickKids, but nothing like the partnership we have today.

You’ve become the fundraising team’s not-so-secret weapon. Lisa Charendoff, who worked at the SickKids Foundation for years, was trying to retire when I met her—I really fucked that up for her. I get a lot of pats on the back for what I do with SickKids, but the people who work there choose to save kids’ lives every day, and they should be getting medals. They could have done anything—they probably could have gone to the States and made way more money, for one—but they’re here making a difference. The SickKids Foundation is a partnership I’m so proud of, but it’s also incredibly hard. You are losing people. You’re talking with parents who have poured everything into their child, so much that there’s nothing left for themselves. Then their kid wants to meet the guy who played Deadpool? I would do anything to make that a reality. Mostly I shoot video messages. I’ll find out a few personal details, like the name of a pet or sibling, to make these kids feel seen and to lighten the impossibly heavy load they are carrying. When I can, I visit in person.

You say that Grace Bowen drew you from rest to effort. Around the same time, you made a major shift in your professional life, moving from rom-com guy or gross-out guy in other people’s movies to doing your own thing in film and in business. Am I right to make a connection? Yes. Before then, I had my platform—I cringe to call it that, but I’m not sure what other word to use—but any partnerships I made were just a monetary thing. Once I started to get involved, I felt better about the things I was doing. I was involved in every aspect of Deadpool, and the takeaway was that there’s no better person to advocate for me than me. That isn’t to say I don’t work with a lot of incredibly capable people, but I think when you play telephone and other people are representing you, you don’t get the same emotional investment. There is no substitute for having skin in the game. That’s how you make connections.

Speaking of connections, you’ve always maintained ties to Toronto. When you were here last year for the Deadpool & Wolverine press tour, you wrote on Instagram, “Goddamn I miss being in Toronto.” What makes us so missable? Toronto influenced me in so many ways, especially as someone who grew up watching the CBC. I remember coming to the city for the first time and being awestruck by the size and the buildings and the grandeur. My hometown of Vancouver isn’t small, but this was on a different level. Then I spent time here shooting films, which is the gift of this job—you get to embed in different places. I lived in Yorkville at one point and off Dundas at another. During the 10 or 15 years I lived in Los Angeles, it was hard on my—well, it was hard on a lot of things, but I found that I was less creative there. It was like, Ah, what a beautiful day. I’ll just go for a hike. I think of Toronto as a place where ideas are born. In winter, you sit in bars and you huddle and you talk and you grow ideas, and then eventually the sun comes out again and you bring those ideas to life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.