10 THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT
EVERYMAN actor John C. Reilly has gone from silverscreen sidekick to Hollywood leading man over the course of his lengthy career. Now 53, he’s portraying roly-poly comic Oliver Hardy in the recently released Stan & Ollie. Here are ten things you don’t know about the life of Reilly.
1 Born in Illinois, he’s the fifth of six children.
2 When he was 12, he and his pals swiped 500 boxes of cereal from a freight train.
3 His flight to Thailand at age 22 to shoot 1989’s Casualties of War was the first time he’d ever been on a plane.
4 He did all of his own singing in 2002’s Chicago, a role that earned him a Golden Globe nomination. 5 In 2004, he quit the movie Manderlay over the planned slaughter of a donkey, which was ultimately scrapped from the final film.
6 He’s a fan of the Chicago White Sox baseball team.
7 He believes he’s been successful as a character actor because “there’s something about me that people can relate to.” 8 He frequents roller rinks in L.A. and says, “One of the reasons I really love roller-skating is because you can be a real social butterfly.” 9 He likes not being recognized and says: “I love that people can’t place me. They don’t know my name. That’s ‘mission accomplished’ in my world.”
10 After his wife gifted him an amateur painting of a clown in the ’90s, he started to collect them and now owns more than 100, but says, “They are not allowed to hang in the house, so I have to keep all my clown paintings in my office.”