O n the roof above the studio, he stands and waits. All afternoon, the studio floor is overbooked and surplus staff work where they can. A television camera stands with him on the roof, infinitely patient. The way it waits there, it could be made of time. He—not so much. “Action!” he shouts, and in short order, the door to the stairwell opens and out step half a dozen spies, dressed in beige trench coats with their collars up.
Of course, they are not real spies, they are actors. Overdressed, ironic parodies of the Z-movie secret agent, sunglasses and fedoras concealing their youth and gender (all of them twenty-something). They are taping a sight gag for children’s TV, they haven’t any plan as such to follow. They improvise, entrusted to their instincts, for the director knows to keep out of their way.
Enduringly famous, several of them, from our perspective. They don’t know this, because they won’t land their breakout roles for another year or more. It is Friday the thirteenth in September of 1974.
Autumnal, low grey-skied September in Toronto. With every minute that passes four o’clock, it looks more and more like rain. Not the best day for filming outdoors, but what can you do? At present, the actors race and leap and hop along the roof, which is a good twenty or twenty-five feet above the ground, maybe higher, until, near the centre edge, they stand and put their backs to the skyline and the cars nosing down Yonge Street in the direction of the weekend.
Only a few japes more to go, the director thinks, and there’ll be enough in the can to knock off too.
Now their heads are bobbing, ducking invisible rocks. And the director is happy, he is beaming, looking younger than his forty-odd years—much the same man as when he played the clown on a kids’ show in the early ’60s. Because all the comedy resides in the actors’ energy: exuberant, zany, unpredictable.
The camera is loving one of the biggest and youngest guys, the scene’s powerhouse. Danny. Daniel Edward Aykroyd.
See how he runs manic circles around the skylight! Watch the tall, burly whirlwind of his body as it gathers pace! Imprudently, he cuts across the skylight’s dirty glass.
The director shouts to him, “Keep off the glass,” but the honks of cars drown out the warning.
Danny plummets, in shock and gasping. In his haste, he did not give the glass—its thinness—a second thought. He stepped on the pane, feeling it burst into shards, the murky void beneath swallowing him whole.
What happens to Danny turns the others on the roof to stone. All that falling could be the death of nearly anyone. They stare at the skylight with a pane now missing on one side. They peer down, down, into the storage room, which a moment ago housed only light stands. And then someone, John Candy or Gilda Radner or another of the actors, starts downstairs to call an ambulance.
Supposing he hadn’t collided with a water pipe on his way down, they will say afterward. The pipe had broken his fall.
He is breathing, and his body is intact. The remains of the skylight glint around it, enormous shards like shark’s teeth. Presently, sirens sound, and Danny, when he is hoisted onto the gurney, groans weakly, “Way to start my career in TV!”
Quick as a shot, the ambulance man replies, “You’re going to be a star.” He pronounces this sentence in an accent of stunned certainty. “We can fix arms and hearts,” he continues, “but not heads.”
To have come away in one piece from such a fall meant Danny Aykroyd’s head had to be something very special.
T he first time I heard Aykroyd and Asperger’s in the same sentence, I had just been diagnosed myself. That would have been back in the early noughties. It aired on National Public Radio, which I listened to on the show’s web archive. Aykroyd hadn’t been in the news for a while by then, but when I saw the NPR link, I recognized the name immediately. That goes without saying.
For a period of about ten years, in the eighth and ninth decades of the twentieth century, Aykroyd had been among TV and cinema’s biggest stars. Being a child of the ’80s, I grew up on his movies. I saw him in Ghostbusters (whose original screenplay he wrote), with Bill Murray, their lasers trained on the slimiest—and funniest—monsters you could ever hope to encounter on film. So I listened with interest as the comic actor answered questions on his life and career—and I almost fell off my chair when he told the interviewer about his Asperger’s.
As a matter of fact, he hadn’t gone behind that microphone expecting to talk about anything quite so personal. The interviewer, Terry Gross, had more or less hypnotized him, with her excellent preparation and gentle questioning. Gross, too, was a little thrown; she seemed almost not to believe that she could have surprised Aykroyd into so rare a confidence. She wondered aloud whether he was joking when he said the funny-sounding word Asperger’s—whether an interviewee like him, all alter egos, a jealous guardian of his private life, might only be teasing her listeners.
But no. The word—mild, high-functioning autism—was uttered, it seems, quite sincerely. So that each time another interviewer would bring it up through the following years, almost in a whisper, as though it were a possible source of embarrassment, he replied in the affirmative.
But he would not elaborate. The window on his mind had been tantalizingly opened—and just as quickly closed.
P eter Aykroyd had worked out west once. He had scouted locations for the National Film Board, in Manitoba, in Saskatoon, in Edmonton, weeks in advance of Princess Elizabeth’s national tour. That was why his wedding to Danny’s mother, Lorraine, took place out in Winnipeg, in September 1951. The king died that winter, and in the summer, Danny was born. Lorraine told her husband to get a proper job.
He worked then as a road engineer in Hull, Quebec (and later behind a mahogany desk at the National Capital Commission). But Peter couldn’t resist sneaking some televisual oomph into the home, in the form of a Philco set. How wondrous the new medium was: ballet dancers one hour, a quiz show the next—it radiated culture throughout the country.
In the evenings, Danny sat and fidgeted in front of the porthole screen, and as the broadcaster read out the news, the little boy repeated aloud every other headline. The Prime Minister John Diefenbaker . . . in Malton, Ontario, the Avro Arrow was rolled out for cameras . . . yesterday’s successful launch of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union . . . Lorraine and Peter listened without batting an eyelid—the telly always had an echo whenever Danny was present; there wasn’t an announcer their son heard without mimicking the syllabic voices.
Someone might speak to him, as he sat watching this or that show, and he would seem miles away. A grown-up’s commands to scrub dirty palms, comb hair, or remake the bed, coming when they did from the other side of the little screen, he could blissfully disregard. He seemed to have ears only for the characters. He could have listened all day to the one called Friday, Sergeant Joe Friday, although the detective entered living rooms every Thursday (and, later, Tuesday)—for the bright, clipped things he said. This and other voices, too, he absorbed, exhaled back, the better to merge himself with them, dissolve in them, become them. Light as a voice. And as free.
Only . . . sometimes the set resolved not to work, as all things electric are prone to do, and the static supplanted the voices then and would have left Danny in angry tears. His father consoled him with a bedsheet. Hung in the basement, it became a movie screen on which Peter projected rented reels. The Ghost Breakers starring Bob Hope, and the Bowery Boys in Ghost Chasers. Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops.
T he Aykroyds’ house stood apart from most other homes in the town, on the edge of Gatineau Park, whose new-built roads wended between the lakes and valleys, ferried visitors by the million every year, and owed their existence to Peter’s engineering. Young Danny had his bedroom in the basement under the garage, waking to the engine rumble sparked by his father’s key in the ignition. It’s time, the always punctual key would inform him. Time for school. Get up.
The plain red-brick building on the corner of Davies Street reminded him of how strange he felt within its walls. The John Wayne swagger of the older boys. The incomprehensible drone of the Lord’s Prayer, like a TV’s glitchy audio. In the hubbub of the playground, he felt his shyness like a deformity, like a misshapen head. The other children thought him a nerd, as Aykroyd would say years later, a geek, as he would say as well, although the kids in Hull would have put it differently back then. A drip, more like it, a square. A funny boy, their parents might have thought, and whether they meant funny ha ha or funny peculiar depended on their mood and perspective. Neither a friend magnet, then, nor a teacher’s pet.
The women teachers at Our Lady of the Annunciation—for they were all women—were short and stout, wearers of talc and corsets and tortoiseshell glasses: in a word, matronly. No malarkey would any of them take. Nor sides; they bestowed their knowledge impartially, on the earners of gold stars and red marks alike, on those who talked dialect at home and those who didn’t, on the aspiring typists and future factory hands. And on Danny. He was in a category all of his own.
A head taller than the other children when they stood alphabetically in line for class, too conspicuous, not knowing what to do with his hands or feet or gaze. He wouldn’t necessarily meet his classmates’ eyes. And that was just the half of it. His sprawling, left-handed compositions read like nothing the teacher would have seen (if the first drafts of his future screenplays are anything to go on): long but ingeniously digressive, branching out into a hundred backstories, each scene and character more inventive and more surprising than the last.
This was a boy who liked nothing better than to loiter in encyclopedias, who knew the insides of atoms and the capitals of all the provinces, who sounded like he’d swallowed his father’s civil engineering manuals. And just wait until you got him on prime numbers or the solar system, talking so fast he would have made Sergeant Bilko proud, Lucille Ball smile. You couldn’t stop him then. His boundless inquisitiveness made him exhausting to teach.
Danny ought to see a professional person. That would have been the advice of the headmistress. Most parents of the period wouldn’t have heard of a shrink for their child. But Peter and Lorraine Aykroyd were not most parents. Both widely read, university educated, with a high regard for science. And Peter, back in his National Film Board days, had worked on documentaries commissioned by the country’s mental health association.
It was at a child guidance clinic—a common euphemism then for child psychiatry—that Mrs. Aykroyd set out her son’s difficulties as best she could. They had worsened in the past year, she told the psychologist, ever since her son had entered sixth grade and Mrs. Marier’s class. This teacher wasn’t tyrannical, but she wasn’t understanding either, always ready with a frown, and teacher and pupil had never gotten along. At first only a few heated words, her punishment would swiftly make itself felt: a rap of her ringed fingers, or of a ruler, to the boy’s temples. Every other peep out of him seemed to merit the strap, until he had ended up dreading school altogether, he who had aced most classes outside of sports. Indeed, thought the psychologist, who would have seen the boy’s academic reports, Danny Aykroyd was very much his high-achieving parents’ son.
First observations. Speaks in a staccato fashion. Hair: unruly, dark. Eyes: one green, one brown, furtive. Weight: satisfactory. Barks or grunts like a small animal when overstimulated (according to parent’s testimony). Can raise a smile or a laugh without meaning to. Or perhaps he does. Talks for Canada. Repetitive to a fault. Narrow interests: guns, police, ghosts. All things mechanical. Excellent memory. Trouble at school. Involuntary eye blinking, shoulder shrugs, twitches. Doesn’t fully grasp social niceties. Has potential to progress.
He submitted willingly to having his mind probed. The psychologist wanted to know why women and children should be saved first in a shipwreck, how many pounds made a ton, where was Chile, what did turpentine come from, which part of a thermometer in the illustration shown was missing.
Danny didn’t need to be asked twice before he gave his answers. He recited numbers, assembled jigsaws, led his pencil tip out of mazes. In rows of squiggles, he detected a chosen symbol: a hexagon, say, or a hoop like a flat tire.
He may have been asked to play a game of word association. That would have been tricky. He wasn’t one to say the first thing that came into his head. There never was a first thing. There were always so many things, and all of them coming up for attention simultaneously; no sooner had he found the word for each than more besides rushed to replace them.
Great was the psychologist’s wonder when the boy’s results were totted up. The test scores identified him as highly gifted, no question about it.
After a number of sessions, the learned doctor would have found the name for Danny’s stubborn eccentricities. The psychologist, based on all the information I possess, talked of childhood schizophrenia (as the autistic spectrum was still called then in some parts), a diagnosis originally brought to Canada by German doctors who had fled the war. An excess of imagination, it was thought, leading the child inward.
Only later would autism become associated with blankness, or incapacity. No longer associated with imagination, let alone artistry.
Danny would attend counselling, as prescribed, for his tics, his anxiety, over several years.
As for the rest, the psychologist had an idea for what might remedy shyness. Had the boy any experience of the stage?
“As an altar boy,” answered Mrs. Aykroyd, unless it was Peter.
Then there was the time he sang for the school, the parents recalled. It had been for the school’s St. Paddy’s celebrations. Danny, flanked by a pair of classmates on the flute and the kazoo, had belted out “McNamara’s Band” to a standing ovation. Or so the Aykroyds’ son, long afterward, would describe it to a reporter in an article for the local press. He would have been on his best behaviour. Stuck to the lyrics, made no waves, held still and upright throughout, since success, he knew, promised a smile from the headmistress and his parents’ relieved pride.
Theatre, the psychologist concluded, could do the boy a whole lot of good.
Adapted and excerpted from Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum by Daniel Tammet. Copyright © Daniel Tammet 2025. Used by permission of The Experiment.
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