In the 20 or so years since he made his last live-action appearance onscreen, Spaceballs and Ghostbusters star Rick Moranis has taken on an almost mythic reputation. He’s “the guy who left Hollywood for his family.” While that is technically true, it doesn’t seem to be Moranis’s preferred framing for doing something he seems sure anybody else with similar opportunities would do. Moranis has not appeared in a live-action film since his wife, Ann, died of breast cancer in 1997. In recent years, when pressed, he has said that he never considered his break from acting to be a “retirement,” but he had stopped appearing in projects that took him away from his kids for extended periods of time.
Videos by ComicBook.com
In spite of popular internet lore, though, Moranis never “walked away from Hollywood” to bravely raise his kids. Instead, he said, he just became more selective and it became easy to say no to things. Right up until today, when Disney announced that Moranis would appear in Shrunk, a follow-up to the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise that he fronted from 1989 until 1997.
“I just love when the Internet is wrong. It’s the only thing that will save journalism,” Moranis joked in an interview with Heeb in 2013. “So he says, ‘I gotta ask, would you do it?’ I said, ‘I don’t say no to anything until everything is presented to me.’ What is it? Is it happening? Is there a script? What’s the part? Who else is in it? Where is it? How long is it gonna take? You know, I need a little bit more information. ‘But it’s something you would do?’ he asks. Do I have to answer that?”
It was this logic that led to him turning down several bigger parts in recent years, including a cameo in Ghostbusters back in 2016. He said at the time that while he wished Paul Feig’s production well,he did not see the point of showing up for a single day on set to revisit something he had done thirty years before.
“I took a break, which turned into a longer break,” Moranis told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
During that break, he did some voice work, which included a recent appearance on The Goldbergs, providing the voice of Dark Helmet (his character from Spaceballs) for a dream sequence.
“I’m a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies,” he told USA Today in 2006, doing an interview in support of his album The Agoraphobic Cowboy. “I found that I really didn’t miss it. In the last few years I’ve been offered a number of parts in movies, and I’ve just turned them down. I don’t know whether I’ll go back to it or not. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and a lot of parenting, and now I’m doing this.”
Moranis launched his career as an actor, comedian, and writer by appearing in Second City Television in the 1980s. He began making a name for himself in Hollywood with the 1983 film Strange Brew, then followed that up with a role in Ghostbusters in 1984. He appeared in cult-favorite films Little Shop of Horrors and Spaceballs in 1986 and 1987, respectively, then reprised his previous role in Ghostbusters II in 1989, the same year he helped launch the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise. His step back from the spotlight has become the stuff of legends among the generation that grew up watching his family-friendly movies, including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
