John Candy: I Like Me faced hardship finding Dan Aykroyd

Spearheaded by Colin Hanks and Ryan Reynolds and backed by Prime Video, John Candy: I Like Me is a documentary centered around the late and great John Candy. The duo had a vision of how it would start and it involved the eulogy headed by Dan Aykroyd, but there were a couple problems — the eulogy wasn’t recorded and more worrisome, neither Hanks or Reynolds knew how to get in touch with Aykroyd.

You see, speaking to the Awards Circuit Podcast, the duo explained Aykroyd “wrote such a beautiful eulogy for John” and they wanted that to start the doc, but it wasn’t right to just not have him there, but “couldn’t find” him to “save our lives.”

“We couldn’t find Dan Aykroyd to save our lives. And we couldn’t get his voice to record it. The voice on the rough cut was a bad impression of him. Eventually, we tracked him down, and he recorded the eulogy. It became as vivid as the day he delivered it the first time.”

Why was Dan Aykroyd so hard to track down?

You see, while in the end they did track him down, Aykroyd kinda stayed on the downlow in the Hollywood scene, prior to some docs in 2025, the first of which was John Candy: I Like Me, and one — I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not — from this year, he hasn’t appeared in any new films since 2024’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. In terms of why Hanks and Reynolds felt so compelled to ink a doc about this passed away comedian; Hanks knew Candy through his father, Tom Hanks, meanwhile Reynolds idolized the actor as a fellow Canuck.

Another actor who was also difficult to track down, but eventually was found, was Bill Murray. Besides Aykroyd and Murray, the doc also brought in the likes of Macaulay Culkin, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Tom Hanks, and Mel Brooks.