Rick Moranis

The art of being the shortest guy on set

Rick Moranis never planned to stand in front of a camera. In the seventies, he preferred the radio booth and the sound controls in Toronto under the pseudonym Rick Allan. But Canadian comedy has a strange pull that ends up dragging in anyone with a gift for parody.

His break on SCTV changed everything.

There he created Bob McKenzie with Dave Thomas. What started as a two-minute filler to meet Canadian content quotas became a record-selling phenomenon and a film titled Strange Brew in 1983. Moranis quickly realized his physique didn't fit the action hero of the era. So he decided to exploit the image of the timid guy who always seems about to apologize for existing.

In 1984, filming began on Ghostbusters, and his career took off in the most absurd way. The role of Louis Tully was originally meant for John Candy, but Moranis turned him into an obsessive accountant who recited tax laws at a party. He improvised much of his dialogue because he knew the language of bureaucracy well. The film grossed 295 million dollars and made him the top-tier supporting actor every studio wanted to hire.

And then the leading roles arrived.

With Little Shop of Horrors in 1986, he proved he could carry a musical plot without losing his comedic touch. But it was Spaceballs in 1987 that cemented his image in the popular imagination under the giant helmet of Dark Helmet. Mel Brooks gave him complete freedom to parody Darth Vader. Moranis played with dolls on screen, and audiences accepted the joke without blinking because his comic timing was flawless.

In 1989, he starred in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It was the biggest hit of his commercial career. The Disney film cost 18 million dollars and multiplied that figure tenfold in theaters around the world. Moranis played Wayne Szalinski, an inventor father who was the opposite of the authoritarian patriarch of the eighties. He was clumsy and nearsighted. His salary per film rose to 2 million dollars during that golden period.

A father's voluntary silence

The death of his wife, Ann Belsky, from liver cancer in 1991 permanently changed his priorities. He tried to balance raising his two children with filming for a few years. He appeared in The Flintstones in 1994 and in the sequel Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves in 1997. But traveling halfway around the world to promote family comedies no longer made sense to him. He decided that his home in New York mattered more than the Hollywood spotlight.

He stepped away from movies without any dramatic statements.

He spent nearly two decades turning down scripts and million-dollar offers. He only accepted very specific voice work, such as in the animated film Brother Bear in 2003. In the year 2005, he released a comedy country album titled The Agoraphobic Cowboy. The album earned a Grammy nomination, but Moranis didn't even consider returning to full-time acting after the media buzz around the award.

In 2018, he briefly returned to voice Dark Helmet for an episode of the series The Goldbergs. Two years later, in 2020, he signed a deal to return to the shrinking-kids franchise with a new installment titled Shrunk. The project suffered constant delays due to the global health crisis and Disney's internal production problems. Moranis stayed completely in the background while development of the film stalled in offices in California.

Despite constant rumors that he has retired for good, he still lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In 2024, he turned 71, staying away from social media and any nostalgic industry events. His most recent notable public appearance was a phone company ad with Ryan Reynolds in 2020 that lasted just thirty seconds. The production contract for Shrunk still appears as active in the actors' union records.