Heartwarming documentary on Toronto comedian John Candy streams this month
Published October 1, 2025 at 3:06 pm
A heartwarming documentary on beloved Toronto comedian John Candy will be available on a streaming service this month.
The film, John Candy: I Like Me, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.
Featuring candid testimonies from John Candy’s friends and family — including Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, and Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Macaulay Culkin — the documentary, directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds, opened the festival this year.
Candy was born in Toronto in 1950 and his father, Sidney, died at the age of 35 of a massive heart attack on John’s fifth birthday. The film touches on this tragic loss and how it impacted Candy’s life.
Sadly, Candy also died of a heart attack at the age of 43 in 1994.
In the 1970s, Candy launched his comedy career as a member of Toronto’s Second City team, followed by SCTV, a sketch-comedy TV series.
Through never-before-seen archival footage and interviews, the film documents Candy’s life and his rise to fame in some of the most popular Hollywood movies of the 1980s and early 1990s, including Stripes (1981), Splash (1984), Spaceballs (1987), The Great Outdoors (1988), Uncle Buck (1989), and Cool Runnings (1993).
The documentary takes its name from Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), a John Hughes film. After Steve Martin’s character Neal Page launches into a long, angry speech in the movie, Candy’s character, Del Griffith, responds with “I like me.”
While the documentary is touching and a wonderful tribute, it doesn’t find many faults with Candy, and has been criticized for being too hagiographic. Comedian Bill Murray jokes that he can barely find anything bad to say about Candy.
Colin Hanks and Ryan Reynolds at the TIFF premiere of I Like Me.
At the premiere, Hanks said that you go into a documentary with a general feeling of what the story is, and the more interviews you do, the clearer the story becomes.
“Everyone had this opinion of John that he was such an everyman, he had this everyman quality,” Hanks said.
Candy suffered from stress and anxiety, as many people do, Hanks added.
“It turns out he is really more of an everyman than we even realized,” he said.
John Candy: I Like Me will be available globally on Prime Video on Oct. 10, 2025.