The Ben Mulroney Show - The new book on comedic legend John Candy

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

- Paul Myers/author If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. Hey, thanks, son. What do I owe you? Don't worry about it. It's payday. Payday, huh? I bet you it went straight into your bank account and you didn't even check your pay stuff. My what? Your pay stuff. Back in my day, you had to wait for a physical check. Then, you had to go to the bank. Deposit it, and wait for it to clear.

Your pay really meant something. Payroll is incredibly complex. It's art and the science. It literally keeps the economy moving. Parole professionals do a lot for us. You know, it's about time we do something for them. How about we ask our leaders to name a day in their honor, a national day to recognize payroll professionals?

I got it. This is perfect. Why don't we explain to people just how important the roles are the payroll professionals play in our lives. We can even ask them to sign a petition. We can even ask them to sign a petition to recognize the third Tuesday in September as the National Day to recognize payroll professionals. We'll rally support and bring the payroll party to the nation.

National payroll party? Precisely. Sounds like a plan, you know, just one thing. What's that? I'm choosing the music. What? And I'm sitting in the backseat. The whole way?

The whole way. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've been following the news, like really following it, you know how exhausting it can be politics conflict uncertainty it's a lot to carry and for many men there's this expectation to stay calm stay in control and not talk about how it's affecting you but the truth is you're allowed to feel overwhelmed you're allowed to say i'm not okay right now and trust me i have been there whether it's the state of the world stress at home or just feeling like you've got to have it all together and have all the answers you don't have to hold it in better help is here to

help with the world's largest network of licensed therapists. They've already supported over 5 million people. You can connect with a therapist online from wherever you are. No wait list, no office visits. And if it's not the right fit, you can switch any time. It's time to put your mental health on the agenda. Talk it out

with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash Mulrooney today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com slash Mulrooney. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for joining us. And John Candy is a great Canadian talent

whose life was extinguished far too soon, far too quickly. We have incredible movies that even that I share with my kids today. They resonate still today. But, and there is a renewed interest in the life of John Candy at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. The opening film was a documentary about this incredible Canadian talent. And in quick succession, following the successful premiere of that film, there's a new book about John Candy's life. and it is um it uh it uh it looks at the good the bad and the ugly and we're joined now

by um the author of the book paul myers paul welcome the show hey uh thanks for having me appreciate it's all the good time to talk about john candy yes indeed well now i've got to ask did did the book in the documentary have um anything to do with each other or was it a happy coincidence it's a happy coincidence and it's funny because our book was going to go out a year ago and i i thought it was it was too long i'd written way too much i did years and years of interviews and i i was asked to sort of resolve one of the conflicts like one of the bring it down in word count basically and i said great i can do that but it's going to take

another month and they said you know what we want this is so good we i'm not kidding they said this is so good but we want to make sure we don't rush the last bit so we so why don't we just push the whole thing back a year? It'll be the 75th birthday of John Candy, and it'll be like a happy occasion. At this time, I knew that they were making, I knew that the Candy family who graciously told me from the start to go for it, go for doing this book,

but they already told me at the beginning that they had a project that they wanted to do, and that it was probably going to be a film. That's all they told me at the time, but they were super nice. Jen Candy gave me what I consider a blessing. She said, he said, you know, thanks for reaching out to us. I know you have, you know, goodness in your heart. You're going to do a great job, and she didn't say we can't, we're not participating because

we're doing our own thing. This is where I kind of heard Ryan was involved, Ryan Reynolds, and I just knew that they were out there making their movie somewhere, and I'm a big Santa Claus documentary, so I was, like, happy for them. And I was curious, you know, so we announced our October 7th state many, many months ago, and then all of a sudden I noticed that they were coming to the film festival a week, a month I had, but that they're, they're, uh, streaming date is three days after my publication date.

And then I just thought, there's a great German word, zeitgeist. Yes, yes. I figured it's the zeitgeist. It's in the air. Everybody wants, everyone needs a little John Candy right now, and it seems to be we're all coming in right now at the same time. And it's,

I think it's really important when, you know, we've got this incredible talent who left this, left his life too soon. And like I said, off the top, I've been showing my kids his movies for, since they were kids, but we are more than our work, right?

We are more than the job that we do. And we know him for his work. The man, John Candy, was far more than the roles he played. And that's really the person that you get to know in this book, isn't it? Yeah, I will say that somebody asked me recently, you know, did you have an agenda or was there something you wanted to do with this book? And I said, the only mission I had was to make him three-dimensional. Make, you know, it's called a life in comedy because that also announces that I'm,

it's about John Kennedy's life in comedy. So it's, I'm very, I'm very much more concerned with how people make things and do things. All my books are about people who make things and do things. But I also know that being human is part of that. And in the case of John Kennedy, we felt like we knew him, as you were saying, because he did give so much of himself in every acting role. Even his comedic roles have heart and humanity, and he modeled empathy as a human being.

And the reason we still talk about him is because he was one of the most empathetic people you're going to meet. And if you were lucky to meet him, and he, everyone speaks of the absence of him now as though it was a fresh loss. At the same time, they also smile warmly remembering his hug. so it's a very it's been a very uh solemn process but also with something that's been a lot of fun uh getting to sort of uh help people talk about john candy to to me so that i can go out and tell this message you know yeah it's uh and you've got you know one of the things that

shouldn't come as a surprise uh but i guess you kind of hoped it it didn't happen to him but to learn that the you know there was so much i mean for lack of a better expression so much weight associated with the fat jokes and that his weight was oftentimes used as a comedic device in a script, lazy comedic device in a script, that that weighed on him. Yeah, yeah, so here's the thing.

Again, I'm not a psychologist, but I know that people pleasing is something where you really want to make everyone feel good. So you'll have a hard time saying no to things. Yeah. And what that does to the person, though, and we have way more understanding of this in the 21st century than we would have had in the 1980s, is that it becomes internalized. And even if he loved himself, which I think he really did know that he was a good person, I think there were moments when he thought people saw him as just the fat guy. And in the 80s, when you look back at this media that he would do, in interviews, interviewers had no trouble calling him fatty to his face.

And, like, you just wouldn't do that today. Well, you know what? I'm glad you brought that up because the moment I read that, I thought of Jonah Hill. And when Jonah Hill, he lost a little bit of weight. And then he's had a tough time taking it off and he puts it back on. And he literally would look at interviewers, be it on junkets or on talk shows. And he would call them out to their face. And that was not how things were done in John Candy's time.

You just had to sit there and take it. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, and John's a good Canadian boy who lost his father at the age of five and was raised by his mother and his aunt. And I'd say that there's something about the way, you know, the responsibility he had at a very young age to be the, quote, man of the house, as well as the fact that he was raised in an empathetic environment by women that nurtured goodness in him. And all those things, he became, he literally carried people on his back, I mean, literally for coming to good. vice, but he also carried all of his family. He carried everybody. He wanted to make sure he was there for Catherine O'Hara, you know, called her on her birthday. Before he died, he called Catherine

O'Hara on her birthday the night before to make sure that she's, how she doing, you know? So it's like one of those things where, if you were a friend with John and, you know, you stayed in touch, you know, and he loved to talk to his friends. He loved his friends. Paul, do you ever sit back And as you were writing this book And you saw You saw his career trajectory You saw the roles that got him excited

You learned about the roles that got him excited Do you have any sense of what Like what kind of movies What kind of career would he have had Had he not passed away? Well, this is something that actually I've come to realize Is that he always was a really good dramatic actor

And even in like in playing transomobile He brought a lot of humanity to that performance that makes it beyond a broad comedy. He did actually explore serious roles, like he had a cameo in JFK, the Oliver Stone. Yes, I forgot about that. And Oliver Stone said at the time, this guy's a serious actor,

he's, you know, don't be surprised if he does. And I'm extrapolating here, he would have done something like a Robin Williams Goodwill Hunting. I think he would have done something like, I think he had it in him. Yeah. He also, Gary Oldman, who was in that film, Gary Oldman and him were going to do Shakespeare in Central Park, you know, and things like that.

And he wanted to direct. Yeah. And here's the weirdest one. Okay, so Quentin Tarantino had contacted him to be in Pulp Fiction. No way. And that was a big surprise. That's something we talked about in the book. I talked to people who work for John Candy, and people who worked for John Candy had this script, and they were reading it, and he read it.

I think it was too violent and too much nudity for him. I think he said it's not the kind of film maybe I want to do. And, you know, Tarantino wasn't the legend yet. He was also making a name for himself, but he wasn't, now Tarantino's like Cortezi, you know, you would do it, no problem. But anyway, isn't that wild? It's wild. That's the side.

I would have loved to do. Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, we were spoiled by having so many great, so many great movies of his, but we were also cheated because what could have come next could have been even better. But regardless, you've chronicled it all in John Candy, a life in comedy. Myers, thank you very much. And thank you for having me. Let's talk about John more often.

Absolutely. Take care. I run to the chaos, and Survivor is chaos. As a mother of a four-year-old, It's vacation. Canada's number one reality show is back. This is when Survivor turns into a horror movie. It's trial by Earth, wind, water, and fire.

Go! Survivor feels like a culmination of my entire life. Everything has led to this moment. Who will have what it takes? Survivor, new season Wednesdays on Global. Stream on Stack TV.