Rick Moranis, the Canadian actor and comic who made a high-profile screen career in the 1980s and 90s playing bespectacled nerds in a string of films such as Ghostbusters, Little Shop of Horrors and Spaceballs, is to return to the screen after a 23-year break after agreeing to act in a reboot of the science-fiction comedy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Moranis began to wind down his film acting career after the death of his wife, costume designer Ann Belsky, from breast cancer in 1991. His last credit was in 1997, with the third in the Shrunk series, the straight-to-video Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.
In 2013, Moranis told the Guardian that he had not retired. “I took a break because I was a single parent, and it got too hard flying around and looking after the kids, and the break got longer and longer and I didn’t miss what I had been doing.”
Moranis has since taken on voiceover work – including on the 2003 Disney animation Brother Bear – as well as releasing two comedy albums, The Agoraphobic Cowboy (2005) and My Mother’s Brisket & Other Love Songs (2013) and reuniting with former sketch partner Dave Thomas to revive their celebrated Bob and Doug McKenzie characters for a TV special in 2007.
Moranis declined an offer to appear in the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters reboot; he does not seem to have been cast in the forthcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, due for release in July.
His new film, currently called Shrunk, will star Josh Gad as the son of Moranis’ character, Wayne Szalinski, who, like his father, aspires to be an inventor. It will be directed by Joe Johnston, who made the 1989 original film and went on to make Jumanji, Jurassic Park III and Captain America: The First Avenger.
