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Dan Aykroyd's Psi Factor
The legendary actor talks about his latest project
by Arthur Greenwald
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 Dan Aykroyd is a man who loves his privacy. So it's not surprising that we know him primarily through his characters -- Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Julia Child, Beldar Conehead -- and more recently as Boolie Werthan, Jessica Tandy's dutiful son in Driving Miss Daisy (for which Aykroyd was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award).
A self-described hyperactive youngster, Dan Aykroyd grew up in Ottawa and attended school across the river in Hull, Quebec, where his first comic improvisations where impersonations of the nuns and priests at the prestigious St. Pius X Prepartory Seminary, from which he was expelled. Aykroyd attended Carleton University in Ottawa, where he studied psychology and criminal sociology, and was active in the Drama Guild. In 1972, Aykroyd joined the Toronto branch of Chicago's famous Second City improv troupe, where his colleagues included Bill Murray and Gilda Radner.
By 1974, Aykroyd had graduated to Second City's Chicago company, from whence fellow Canadian Lorne Michaels made him a founding cast member of Saturday Night Live. Aykroyd's versatility ensured his celebrity status, but joining forces with John Belushi made both men into stars. An idle fantasy on a cross-country trip, Aykroyd and Belushi's Blues Brothers grew from an audience warm-up bit to a twenty-five city tour, a hit album, and a major motion picture. Aykroyd and Belushi starred together in three films, and had planned several more before Belushi's tragic death in 1982 from a drug overdose.
The next year, Aykroyd re-established his film career, co-starring with Eddie Murphy in Trading Places and, a year later, co-writing and co-staring in Ghostbusters, which for many years was the highest-grossing comedy of all time.
Ghostbusters, of course, played the paranormal for laughs. Not so for Psi Factor, the new syndicated series hosted by Aykroyd. A step beyond The X-Files, Psi Factor dramatizes unexplained events based on the "actual cases" of the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. An articulate exponent of the unexplained, Aykroyd is a serious student of psychic phenomena.
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Meet Dan Aykroyd, on video.
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Dan Aykroyd
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