John Candy nearly starred in two violent crime movie classics: “Which would have been bizarre”
An actor who becomes famous for making comedy movies going against the grain and playing a dramatic role in a serious film has become a Hollywood rite of passage, and while John Candy wasn’t unfamiliar with straight-laced fare, he could have gone as against type as it’s possible to get.
Although he rose to fame as a larger-than-life funnyman whose boisterous charisma and infectious enthusiasm could easily steal every scene he was in, Candy also knew how to inject his characters with the right amount of pathos to ensure they rarely came across as one-dimensional or archetypal.
Titles like Stripes, Splash, Spaceballs, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, and Cool Runnings made excellent use of his talents, but it was clear that if and when he was ever given the opportunity to headline a picture that required him to play it entirely straight, he could have knocked it out of the park.
His memorable turn as the slick, shady, and fast-talking lawyer, Dean Andrews Jr, in Oliver Stone’s JFK was a tantalising tease of what Candy could deliver when he could spread his wings outside of his comedy wheelhouse, but that breakthrough dramatic role never materialised before his tragic death in March 1994 at the age of only 43.
For anyone who watched his movies at the time they were being released, or even those who’ve grown up with them after his passing, it’s difficult to imagine someone like Candy appearing in a violent crime flick from an A-list auteur that would be embraced as an instant classic. And yet, it almost happened. Twice, no less, as his son, Christopher, revealed to Hats Off Entertainment.
“Pulp Fiction, he got sent the script of Pulp Fiction, which would have been bizarre,” he shared. “And then, the one that his driver told me about was that he was up to be in Goodfellas, and he screen-tested for it. I have the photo somewhere. But, gosh, there’s footage of him looking like a tough kind of gangster guy. So those were shockers for me. I was going through it, going, like, ‘Whoa, this would have been a completely different kind of John Candy.'”
Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese’s respective crime epics are two of the greatest movies of the 1990s, if not cinema history, and the ensembles in each are pitch-perfect from top to bottom. That said, it would have been fascinating to see Candy in either one of them, since he was one of the last actors of his era that anyone would expect to play a supporting part in a gritty, foul-mouthed, and brutal R-rated film.
Imagining how he would have dealt with Tarantino’s signature style of dialogue, or how he would have fared sparring with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Liotta in a Scorsese-directed mob story, are comfortably two of the biggest ‘what if’ scenarios of a career that was cut far too short. John Candy starring in Pulp Fiction or Goodfellas sounds nuts, which is why it might have been genius had it panned out.
