Dan Aykroyd said a terrifying childhood experience came right after his first performance on stage and “put me off performing” for a while
Dan Aykroyd recalls a chilling childhood experience.
Saturday night live legend Aykroyd, 71, appeared in the final episode of Dan Carvey and David Spade A fly on the wall podcast to talk about his experiences over decades of performing in comedy and on screen. During the episode, Aykroyd talked about when he first became interested in the performing arts as a child — and how his childhood friends brought him to a funeral home to see dead bodies right after.
“I’m in third grade, and they’re doing an Irish concert for St. Patrick’s Day, and they made me learn ‘McNamara’s Band.’ So they put me in a green bowler hat and a green vest and green pants and leprechaun shoes, put me on stage with lip sync, they made me learn it,” he shared on the podcast. “So the concert comes and I go to the concert and I start singing – I remember it vividly – and I finish and finish the tap, and they howl, the audience.”
Aykroyd recalled being surprised at how much the crowd seemed to enjoy his performance immediately afterward, until two of his friends suggested they leave the church hall where the concert was held.
“There was a big round of applause, they took me off the stage and I was like, ‘Wow, that was really, really interesting,’ and then two of my friends came up to me and said, ‘Hey, that was nothing, man,’ like that bad-ass in pinocchio,” he recalled.
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Dan Aykroyd in “My Girl”.
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Aykroyd said he and his young friends went to the funeral home to see the seven dead bodies while the home was being prepared for the funeral. The whole family drowned after the crash, Aykroyd recalled.
“That’s how I went from the elation of singing ‘McNamara’s Band’ and being cheered, to two minutes later, walking into the funeral home where seven bodies were laid out,” he said. “Seven. Father, mother, brothers, sisters.”
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“I will never forget it as long as I live.. He rolled the car [a river] and drowned. So they take me from my performance, the euphoria, to … wow,” he added, noting that the experience put him off performing for a while. “I didn’t do a gig for years and years after that. It put me off the performance.”
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Dan Aykroyd (second from left) with the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live’; around 1977
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Aykroyd did not avoid performances for too long. At the age of 17, the Canadian performed as a professional comedian in Toronto. He also stood out as the youngest member Saturday night liveoriginal cast when he debuted in 1975, according to his bio on Second City’s website. Aykroyd continued to act SNLthe first four seasons and wrote in appeared in favorite movies like The Blues Brothers, Ghost busters and Stošarka.
Aykroyd’s experience at that funeral home also came back in a roundabout way; he played the owner of a funeral home in the nineties My girlfriend movies, in which he starred with Jamie Lee Curtis. The next one is expected to appear in the upcoming Ghost busters continuation Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
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Source: HIS Education