Ahhh, sweet Rick Moranis. He was the übernerd in the eighties and then, suddenly, he was nowhere. This bothered me for years, so finally I decided to ask the man himself: “Hey, Rick! What the hell happened?!”
And this is what he said: “I took a break because I was a single parentIV and it got too hard, working and looking after my kids,” he says. “The break got longer and longer and I realized I didn’t miss what I had been doing, keeping in the mind that the last films I’d done weren’t as gratifying as they weren’t collaborative comedies.V Movies were changing, my kids were changing, so I decided just to stop doing it and one thing led to another. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a performer or an actor. It was only after I had a pretty high degree of success and became a marketable commodity and was asked to act in other people’s projects and to function as an actor and not comedian, and I didn’t find it that enjoyable. So I just stopped.”
Does he miss it?
“Oh goodness, no.”
So very Moranis, don’t you think? It makes me miss his sweet nerdy face even more. Still, at least we have his finest moments.
5 |
Wayne Szalinski, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids |
Moranis enters franchise hell. He clearly enjoyed the first one the best and he’s (unsurprisingly) great as the batty scientist.
4 |
Nathan, Parenthood |
A rare non-nerdy role for Moranis, and he’s adorable in it. Bonus points for singing a Carpenters song, too.
3 |
Dark Helmet, Spaceballs |
Rick Moranis as Darth Vader, aka Dark Helmet! For God’s sake, what more do you want, people?
2 |
Seymour, Little Shop of Horrors |
Okay, so he’s not Pavarotti but the man can honestly sing.
1 |
Louis Tully, Ghostbusters |
He is hilarious as the accountant throwing the worst party ever (“Everybody, this is Ted and Annette Fleming. Ted has a small carpet cleaning company in receivership, but Annette is drawing a salary from a deferred bonus from two years ago . . .”), and adorable as the demonic Key Master. Moranis at his most Moranisish.
IV. Moranis’s wife, Ann, died from cancer in 1991.
V. Moranis’s later films included The Flintstones and, er, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves. So, you know, fair enough.