John Candy was once on the shortlist to star in Thinner, the Stephen King adaptation that turned a cursed weight-loss spiral into a body-horror tale. Mitchell Galin, who was involved with the film’s production, said the team reached out to Candy’s representatives before the project finally moved ahead with another actor.
“We did reach out to [John] Candy’s people,” Galin said. He added that “for whatever reason, Candy was either busy or he didn’t spark to [the material]… I really have no idea.”
That detail has resurfaced as Candy is back in the spotlight through I Like Me, the acclaimed documentary directed by Colin Hanks that revisits the life and career of the Canadian comedy star who became a mainstream movie draw in the 1980s. Candy was known for crowd-pleasing films such as Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck and The Great Outdoors, and in 1986 he co-starred in Armed and Dangerous with Eugene Levy, a movie that later drew a 9% rating.
Thinner had been stuck in development hell for years by the time the casting idea came up. Galin said Stephen King thought the role might help Candy lose weight, a comment that underlines how different the film’s path might have been had the comedian said yes. Instead, Candy died in March 1994 while making a movie in Mexico, and filming on Thinner began a few months later with Robert John Burke wearing a fat suit.
Galin said the team was prepared to keep moving if the answer never came back. “At some point, you punt it out there, if it doesn’t get the response you want, at the end of the day, I really don’t care,” he said. By the time Thinner reached theaters in 1996, the film made only a small profit on a budget of just under $10 million — a modest finish for a project that had once imagined John Candy at its center.
