Mike Myers Wants To Make Yearly Movies With One Of His Biggest Characters
Sounds good to us!
While Mike Myers’ new Netflix series The Pentaverate hasn’t exactly proven to be the big comeback hit the Saturday Night Live alum was likely hoping for, the actor has no shortage of beloved characters under his belt. And in the case of at least one of those characters, Myers says he would love to play him in a movie literally every single year. It isn’t the ever-shagging Austin Powers or even the basement-dwelling Wayne Campbell he was talking about, but the onion-layered ogre Shrek.
In a recent career retrospective with GQ, Mike Myers was clear that he is far from weary of playing Shrek. “You know the old joke: I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member. I have always felt that way,” Myers said. “I love playing Shrek. If I had to do one Shrek a year I’d be thrilled.” You can watch that and the rest of the interview below.
Along with his willingness to continue playing the role, Mike Myers talked about why he accepted it in the first place. “I love the idea of taking a fairy tale and turning it on its head… having it be that all the traditional bad guys are good guys and all the traditional good guys are bad guys,” Myers said. “And I realized it’s a dramatic role. I mean, halfway through I went ‘there’s an emotional center here.’ u know the old joke: I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member. I have always felt that way. The concept of going from a self-loathing ogre to a self-accepting ogre was meaningful to me.”
Clearly, as Variety notes, Mike Myers wasn’t the only one who found the ogre’s story meaningful. Shrek made $478 million, became the very first winner for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and put DreamWorks Animation on the map. Three sequels followed with Shrek 2 making $928 million, Shrek the Third netting $813 million, and Shrek Forever After bringing home $752 million. In each, Myers is joined by stars like Eddie Murphy as the titular ogre’s best friend Donkey, Cameron Diaz as his main squeeze Fiona, Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots, John Cleese and Julie Andrews as the King and Queen, and more. Variety notes there is a Shrek revival in the works and the spin-off Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is on its way to theaters at the end of this year.
A Shrek revival couldn’t come soon enough for Mike Myers, as his latest project — the comedy mini-series The Pentaverate — has not done very well. Lampooning the idea of conspiracy theories and secret societies, in The Pentaverate Myers plays eight characters in a story about the clandestine group who have the so-called leaders of the world on puppet strings. The concept is, in fact, at least close to 30 years old, as one of Myers’ characters goes on a rant about the fictional group in 1993’s So I Married an Axe Murderer.
