Chevy Chase made a rare appearance at the 40th Annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival in a wheelchair.
The 82-year-old comedian wore jeans and a pink button-down paired with a blazer and white cap to attend the event hosted in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Thursday, February 26. Photos obtained by Us Weekly showed Chase being wheeled onto the red carpet for a screening of I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not at the Savor Cinema.
A second image showed Chase standing up while inside the event, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not premiered via CNN last month and offered longtime fans an inside look at Chase’s life and career — including his tough upbringing.
“I wanted to figure out who was the real person behind the conflicted, guarded and somewhat fragile man we see on camera,” documentary director Marina Zenovich told Variety in a December 2025 interview. “What was behind the surface of his slightly intimidating superstar bravado? Was there any self-awareness there? Having interviewed Chevy at length, I have to say that yes, it’s all there — and a whole lot of pain and heartache too.”
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Chase made headlines for telling Zenovich that she’s “not bright” in a rather tense exchange in the film.
“I’m complex, and I’m deep, and I can be hurt easily, and I react spontaneously to people who want to figure me out, as it were,” he explained. “As somebody who will hold up my guard, I’m not going to let anybody figure me out, per se.”
Zenovich discussed the awkward moment during her same Variety interview.
“I’d never done an interview where someone was so rude to me,” she said. “But I was so worried going into that first interview with him about how I was going to say to him, like, ‘Everyone thinks you’re an a**hole.’ I thought if I did, he would throw me out of his house. So the minute he said that to me, I had a way in.”
Chase spoke about making the documentary with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Thursday, noting that the movie wasn’t really his choice.
“Here’s the thing — they asked me to do it. I liked it, it’s very real,” he said. “I mean, honestly, my life is what it is. I like my life.”
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Chase added, “I can’t imagine what could have been hard about it. It’s not like I came out of prison and didn’t want anybody to know.”
The Saturday Night Live legend was candid in the film about experiencing abuse during his childhood at the hands of mother Cathalene Parker, who died in 2005.
“I felt like this was an out-of-control woman, who I look back on and I say, ‘I feel sorry for her,’” he said. “She had her own issues. Bad ones, but she was physically abusive to me.”
The documentary also looked back on Chase’s 2021 health scare. It was reported at the time that he had been put into an eight-day coma after experiencing heart failure. Chase spent five weeks in the hospital.
“According to the doctors, my memory would be shot from it,” he said in the movie. “That’s what’s happened here.”
