For nearly thirty years, Eugene Levy carried a cathedral of quiet where the world expected an anecdote. Now, at seventy-seven, he opens the door and lets the light in. What spills out is not gossip but devotion: a story about John Candy told the only way Levy could bear to tell it—slowly, carefully, with a comedian’s precision and a friend’s tremble. The result isn’t a eulogy; it’s a reunion.
Their origin is a love letter to a city—Toronto—and a room—Second City—where talent and terror share a stage. Candy arrived like weather: big, warm, a barometer you could set your mood by. Levy was the counterpoint—measured, exact, a craftsman of pauses. Together they discovered a shared instrument: he builds the scaffolding, Candy floods it with sunlight. Audiences didn’t just laugh; they felt invited into a private agreement between two men who understood that the most generous joke is the one that makes your partner look better.
The silence after Candy’s death in 1994 has often been misread as distance. Levy corrects that gently: it was a promise. He had no appetite for reducing a friend to a paragraph or a press hit. Grief, he suggests, is a high-stakes editor. It cuts anything that feels untrue, and for a long time every sentence felt like betrayal—of nuance, of privacy, of the dozens of small, unphotographed kindnesses that made John Candy the person behind John Candy. Better, then, to say nothing than to say less than the truth.
So why speak now? Because time doesn’t blunt; it clarifies. Levy finds himself hearing Candy in places he didn’t expect—on sets when a younger actor needs gentleness more than notes; in writers’ rooms when the easy gag could be traded for the generous one; at home, watching his son shape a series that prizes humanity over cynicism. Schitt’s Creek became, among other things, an unannounced conversation with the past: what if kindness is not the punchline but the premise? Candy would have loved that.
Levy doesn’t saint John; he completes him. There were insecurities, the public pressure threaded through a private appetite to please, the toll of carrying “joy” as a job description. The health scares weren’t a twist; they were a drumbeat. Yet even in the weariness there is this: Candy’s work was a ministry of permission. He allowed audiences to be big and soft, to take up space without apologies, to find the sweet spot where vulnerability turns into buoyancy. That’s why he remains beloved. We didn’t just laugh at him; we recognized ourselves and felt better for it.
In telling the story, Levy performs a magician’s trick—he makes absence present. You can hear John in the pacing, in the choice to underplay rather than grandstand, in the way memory is deployed not as currency but as care. He recalls quiet moments—a shared sandwich in a rehearsal break, an improvised button that rescued a scene from mediocrity, the way Candy thanked crew by name—because these are the stitches that hold a life together. Fame frays; kindness binds.
Levy admits he still consults John in the in-between hours. Would this bit be funnier if I stepped back? Is the joke warm enough to deserve an audience? On good days, the answers arrive like a grin you can hear. On bad days, silence is its own counsel. Either way, the conversation continues, proof that friendship, properly kept, is less a chapter than a language you never stop speaking.
He ends, as he must, with gratitude. For the work, yes. For the films that lodge in holidays and hearts. But mostly for the man who left rooms lighter than he found them and taught a generation of comedians that generosity isn’t just moral—it’s hilarious. At seventy-seven, Eugene Levy finally says out loud what his choices have been saying for decades: John Candy was the partner of a lifetime, and the laughter you still hear is not an echo. It’s a presence.
