How John Candy inspired Seth Rogen’s entire career: “Maybe I could be in movies”
He may be currently enjoying vast amounts of well-deserved praise for his ‘behind-the-scenes-of-Hollywood’ Apple TV+ smash The Studio, but then Seth Rogen has plenty of material to work with.
After more than 20 years on both sides of the camera, the Canadian-born actor has scooped up multiple awards while making some of the funniest movies of the modern era, and shows no signs of stopping yet.
Rogen kicked off his career in the high school comedy series Freaks and Geeks before landing a role at just 22 in the creepy classic Donnie Darko. But it was thanks to his partnership with director Judd Apatow that his career really took off. He first appeared alongside Steve Carell in the brilliant The 40-Year-Old Virgin, then Apatow produced Rogen’s own landmark comedy Superbad, which in turn launched the careers of Jonah Hill, Emma Stone and Michael Cera and became one of the highest-rated comedy films of all time.
It began a movement of similar movies involving the same talent, including Knocked Up with Paul Rudd, Pineapple Express and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and toward the end of the century’s first decade, Seth Rogen and his childhood friend and writing partner, Evan Goldberg, were two of the most in-demand people in the industry. They made a directorial debut with 2013’s The End of the World, and over the next decade took on a host of projects, from adult animation (2016’s insane Sausage Party) to warring householders comedy (Neighbors, one and two).
When looking at influences that led to Rogen’s rise to prominence, perhaps it’s no surprise to hear John Candy’s name given that they’re both Canadian and the level of movie fame the latter had when Rogen was a kid growing up in Vancouver. Candy was from Toronto, some 3,000 miles away, but the pair have similarly affable presences in their films. Moreover, Rogen went on to work with several of the same native actors as the late Candy, including Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy.
He once tweeted, “John Candy was my favourite actor growing up and was one of the people that made me think that maybe I could be in movies”.
Candy, of course, was one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. After a theatrical start to his career and a breakthrough on Canadian TV, he brought his loveable rogue persona to a string of massive hits throughout the decade, including in one of the finest comedy movies in history: 1987’s peerless Planes, Trains and Automobiles opposite Steve Martin.
An immediate hit with critics and audiences, the John Hughes-directed comedy tracked the epic journey of an advertising executive and a travelling salesman, thrown together and trying to get home for Thanksgiving with increasingly chaotic results. Nearly 40 years after its release, it still stands up as one of the funniest films imaginable, with countless iconic scenes (“Those aren’t pillows”, the moment Candy becomes the devil, Martin’s gloriously sweary airport rant) and two central performances that have yet to be bettered in a comedy feature.
It served to increase Candy’s profile hugely and he took a similar role the following year in The Great Outdoors with fellow Canadian Dan Aykroyd before a fantastic showing opposite child star Macaulay Culkin in 1989’s Uncle Buck.
More success followed for Candy, with cameos in the likes of JFK and Home Alone and, especially as the lead in 1993’s Jamaican bobsleigh hit, Cool Runnings, but sadly, he died of a heart attack at just 43, less than a year later.
