Rick Moranis first gained major recognition as part of the groundbreaking sketch comedy series “Second City Television.” Interestingly, he wasn’t originally a member of the comedy group that the show is named after. Together with Dave Thomas, another cast member, Moranis crafted the beloved characters Bob and Doug McKenzie, who later starred in the film “Strange Brew” and released two comedy albums. This success marked the beginning of Moranis’s flourishing film career.

During the 1980s, Moranis featured in an impressive lineup of films that are considered among the top comedies of that era. This includes “Ghostbusters,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Spaceballs,” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” among others. He was also nearly part of “The Breakfast Club” and “Three Amigos,” though those projects didn’t work out for him. The 1990s saw him in two “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” sequels, “The Flintstones” live-action film, and the overlooked sports comedy, “Little Giants.” However, after “Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves” and a guest spot on “Muppets Tonight” in 1997, Moranis stepped away from the limelight, with only occasional TV appearances and no further film roles. 

Although Moranis never officially retired from acting, he made a clear choice to reduce his presence in the entertainment industry. So what prompted this decision, what has he been doing during this time away, and will he eventually return to the big screen? 

Even though Rick Moranis was never a member of Second City, it was clear he could hold his own with the legendary improv troupe. Moranis’s improv skills led to a great party moment in “Ghostbusters,” with director Ivan Reitman revealing that the actor made up pretty much all of Louis Tully’s hilarious banter during the character’s house party scene right there on the fly. And so it went with Moranis in this early years of his career, with directors allowing him to ad lib and trusting his ability to make his own dialogue even better than what was on the page.

But the more popular Moranis got, and the more expensive and studio-driven his movies became, the less of that freedom he was afforded. As Moranis explained to Sound and Vision in 2004, “On the last couple of movies I made — big-budget Hollywood movies — I really missed being able to create my own material. In the early movies I did, I was brought in to basically rewrite my stuff … By the time I got to the point where I was ‘starring’ in movies, and I had executives telling me what lines to say, that wasn’t for me.” Not as interested in just saying the words in the script as he was in being able to tweak and improve as he saw fit, the process of making movies lost its luster for Moranis.

In addition to dwindling creative freedom, another major event occurred that had Rick Moranis rethinking how much time he wanted to spend on film sets. His wife, costume designer Ann Belsky, died in 1991 from breast cancer. Moranis had already been planning and rearranging his career around caring for his ailing wife, having passed on the lead role in 1991’s “City Slickers” as a result — but once she was gone, it really took a toll, in particular, because Moranis was now a single father to the couple’s two children.

As he later told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, he loved working with the creative collaborators he encountered during his time as a movie star, but then he “went from that to being at home with a couple of little kids, which is a very different lifestyle. But it was important to me. I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever. My life is wonderful.” Of all the reasons for someone to abandon a successful and lucrative acting career, doing it to devote more time to family life is certainly one of the most understandable and admirable. 

While it’s been a commonly-repeated assumption over the years that Rick Moranis retired from acting, that’s not actually the case. The actor never announced any sort of retirement. In fact, he never even really officially announced he was taking a break at the time. There didn’t really seem to be a clearly-defined roadmap for Moranis in how he was going to guide his career after becoming a widowed father, and it wasn’t initially in the plans to be away for a long enough span of time that he needed to formally declare his hiatus.

In 2005, Moranis spoke to USA Today about his venture into country music — more on that later — and the conversation naturally turned to the scaling back of his acting career. Moranis explained, “I pulled out of making movies in about ’96 or ’97. 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. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn’t miss it.” 

Some people see acting as their lifestyle, while others just treat it as a job, and Moranis clearly leans towards the latter. With that in mind, who would keep working at their job if they didn’t have to? 

One of the main reasons why it was strange that people assumed Rick Moranis had retired is that he did, in fact, continue making movies and television into the 2000s. The difference was, they were all voice roles in animated projects. The actor was no stranger to that arena, and Moranis voiced more of your childhood than you likely realized. Older millennials may remember the short-lived 1990 animated series “Gravedale High,” which starred Moranis as the lead character. He also narrated an episode of the beloved anthology series “Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories.” 

After stepping away from appearing in movies, Moranis re-teamed with Dave Thomas to voice moose named Rutt and Tuke — sounding more than a little like Bob and Doug McKenzie — for the 2003 Disney animated movie “Brother Bear,” its tie-in video game, and its 2006 direct-to-video sequel. Moranis also voiced two characters in 2001’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of the Misfit Toys,” which serves as a sequel to the iconic 1964 stop-motion Christmas special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” 

Voice roles would ultimately comprise the entirety of Moranis’s credits between 1997 and 2007, meaning that entire span of time passed without him doing any on-screen acting work. 

In 2006, Rick Moranis made a somewhat rare talk show appearance when he was a guest on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” But he wasn’t there to promote any acting work, nor was it just a random appearance by a veteran celebrity, which wasn’t unusual for the show. In fact, Moranis was there to both perform and talk about his country song, “Press Pound,” from the album “The Agoraphobic Cowboy.” 

He had previously made a music and comedy album with Eugene Levy back in 1989, but “The Agoraphobic Cowboy” was essentially Moranis’s debut as a legitimate solo musician. “The Agoraphobic Cowboy” was nominated for a Grammy for best comedy album, the second such nomination Moranis received after earning one for Bob and Doug McKenzie’s “The Great White North” 23 years earlier. Moranis later released his second solo album and most recent to date, 2013’s “My Mother’s Brisket and Other Love Songs.”

Given that one of Moranis’s first big films was a musical — “Little Shop of Horrors” — and that he was known for impersonating famous singers and performing funny songs on “SCTV,” an eventual side career as a musician shouldn’t have come as a surprise to longtime fans. 

We mentioned earlier that Rick Moranis’s hiatus from acting on screen came to an end in 2007. So what did he do that year that finally got him to appear in a non-voice performance again? Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a Bob and Doug McKenzie project, with Bob clearly one of the characters that Moranis has the most fondness for out of all the ones he’s played and/or helped create over the years. 

An hour-long special, “Bob and Doug McKenzie’s Two-Four Anniversary,” aired on Canadian television network CBC on May 20, 2007. It featured Moranis and Dave Thomas as the titular duo looking back on their “career,” while also making mention of Moranis and Thomas themselves. According to Thomas, it was to be the last time that he and Moranis would appear on screen as the characters, which has thus far been the case. 

Despite his fondness for the character and willingness to do voice work, Moranis declined to join Thomas for the 2009 animated series “Bob and Doug,” though Moranis was an executive producer. The 2007 special was the last time Moranis played Doug in any filmed capacity, though he did play the character in a 2017 live charity event.  

There are a few contenders for Rick Moranis’s “signature” role, and a lot of it comes down to how old you were at certain points of his career. An entire generation will definitely point to Wayne Szalinski in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” while big-time “Star Wars” kids probably lean more toward Dark Helmet of “Spaceballs.” Anyone who doesn’t choose either of those will most likely go with Louis Tully, aka Vinz Clortho, aka the Keymaster, from “Ghostbusters.”

Of all the franchises he starred in, “Ghostbusters” was the first to make a big-screen comeback, leading people to wonder if reprising a classic character would be just the thing to entice Moranis out of semi-retirement. But Moranis turned down a cameo in the 2016 female-led “Ghostbusters” reboot because it didn’t appeal to him. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, “Why would I do just one day of shooting on something I did 30 years ago?” 

Moranis also subsequently passed on appearing in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” or “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” which were a direct continuation of “Ghostbusters II” and featured the return of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson as their original characters — even though, according to Hudson, Moranis was offered a lot more money than he was. 

Given that Rick Moranis couldn’t be persuaded to return to the “Ghostbusters” franchise — even in the face of an impressive payday, if Ernie Hudson is to be believed — it seemed as though none of his characters short of Bob McKenzie could get him excited again. Even voice roles weren’t necessarily a foregone conclusion: Moranis declined to participate in both the “Bob and Doug” cartoon and the 2008 “Spaceballs” animated series, the latter of which was co-created by Mel Brooks and even managed to get Dom DeLuise and Joan Rivers to reprise their roles from the original movie.

So when Moranis’s “Spaceballs” character, Dark Helmet, appeared in a dream sequence during an episode of ABC’s ’80s nostalgia sitcom “The Goldbergs,” people generally assumed it was a soundalike. But much to everyone’s surprise, it was in fact Moranis himself, who recorded all-new dialogue for the episode. 

It was his first television acting appearance of any kind since the 2007 “Bob and Doug” special 11 years earlier. Despite it only being a voice role and comprising just a few lines of dialogue, it still seemed to suggest that Moranis was beginning to soften a bit on doing cameos and reprising classic characters. 

Some of Ryan Reynolds’s best career moments, particularly outside of acting, have been his fun Mint Mobile commercials. While he could have just invested in the company, did a few bare-minimum spokesperson appearances, and left it at that, Reynolds has gone all-in on bringing his considerable charm and clout to really fun ads for that company and others he has invested in. And in 2020, those Mint Mobile commercials featured the first on-screen appearance of Rick Moranis in 13 years.

Moranis wasn’t exactly a recluse, still making appearances and being photographed at various events, premieres, and the like. But the 2020 Mint Mobile commercials were the first time in over a decade that Moranis specifically made a dedicated on-screen appearance in anything, particularly as an actor — even though he was technically playing himself, as it were. Given the state of the world in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and various other issues and events, Moranis doing a fun, smiling cameo felt like the return of a beloved uncle showing up to tell us everything was going to be okay. 

“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” is easily one of the best Disney movies of all time, animated or otherwise. Rick Moranis plays Wayne Szalinski, father and struggling inventor whose latest project inadvertently shrinks his children and the next door neighbors’ kids. The four kids then have a fun adventure through a yard that, to them, is a wild jungle full of dangerous creatures and insurmountable obstacles — all while avoiding getting stepped on by the people who are now massive giants to them.

The fact that Moranis had already returned for both theatrical sequels to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” proved that he had a definite fondness for the franchise and the character. He might have passed on playing Wayne for the 1997 syndicated TV show, but it’s not exactly unusual for the stars of a film series to skip the subsequent small-screen adaptation. 

When there was rumblings in 2019 of a reboot, nobody held their breath that Moranis would star or even make a cameo. Shockingly, Moranis signed on and was all set to return as Wayne Szalinski in a legacy sequel called “Shrunk.” So it was especially frustrating when, in 2023, it was revealed that the reboot had stalled. As of now, there is no word on when, or even if, the project will be revived. 

Despite Rick Moranis’s “Second City Television” roots, and how often he has returned to the Bob McKenzie character he created and played on the show, the actor didn’t participate in a 2008 live “SCTV” charity event. So even “SCTV” isn’t always a given to get Moranis out and participating in a project. That being said, when Martin Scorsese gets involved in something, that’s a whole different ballgame.

When the director put together a reunion special for Netflix called “An Afternoon with SCTV,” it brought back all living members of the show’s main cast — Moranis included. It featured the performers on stage in front of a live audience talking about their time on the show, interspersed with clips. Despite being announced in 2018 and with the stage component having already been filmed, the special is currently in limbo. It was initially believed to have been shelved entirely by Netflix, though clarification later came that Scorsese simply became too busy with other projects and hasn’t yet had the time to complete it. 

Here’s hoping it eventually sees the light of day, not only because of Moranis’s participation but also that of “SCTV” cast member Joe Flaherty, who has since passed away. 

Rumors about a sequel to “Spaceballs” have been circulating for many years, and it’s not because the movie was so beloved — in fact, one thing that “Spaceballs” fans probably haven’t heard is that the movie wasn’t particularly well-liked by critics upon its release. A sequel was actually mentioned within the original film, which was of course a joke, but there are probably people out there who still hoped it would eventually happen.

In 2014, Brooks told Parade that Rick Moranis had long been one of the biggest things holding back a “Spaceballs” sequel, saying, “Without Rick, I wouldn’t do it.” Well, given how few projects Moranis participates in, it seemed like “Spaceballs 2” was going to forever remain an unrealized dream for fans of the sci-fi parody. 

But in June 2025, Brooks shocked the world by officially announcing “Spaceballs 2” — quickly followed by confirmation that, in addition to returning actors Bill Pullman, Daphne Zuniga, and Brooks himself, Moranis was indeed going to reprise the role of Dark Helmet on screen once again. It seems that the Schwartz ultimately proved too powerful a force for Moranis to resist.