The director who couldn’t stand working with Mike Myers: “Kiss my big fat white butt”
Is the Mike Myers comeback tour threatening to get underway? Probably not, despite the actor and comedian dropping another hint that he’s ready to increase his onscreen activity.
When the fifth Shrek movie arrives in cinemas in June 2027, it’ll be the first time the Saturday Night Live alum has played the leading role in a movie since the fourth Shrek movie, ending a 17-year wait for Myers to take a prominent billing in a feature, and he might not be finished there, either.
The actor and comedian recently confirmed that the long-mooted fourth Austin Powers is in the works, but he’s been saying that for a while, and we’re no closer to getting the shagadelic secret agent back on our screens, so it’s best to take that one with a pinch of salt, especially when more than two decades have passed since Goldmember.
2008’s The Love Guru was Myers’ last live-action star vehicle, and the stories that emerged from behind the scenes were a lot more interesting than anything that happened in the picture, with tales suggesting, and not for the first time, that the funnyman’s diva-like behaviour made him a nightmare to work with.
Obviously, those sorts of stories have been following him around since the early 1990s, and if enough of your former collaborators say that you’re a nightmare to work with and a bit of an arsehole, then you’re most likely a nightmare to work with and a bit of an arsehole, such is the law of averages.
In his first major movie role, Penelope Spheeris found that out the hard way, with the relationship between the two becoming so fractured on Wayne’s World that the filmmaker suggested that Myers had taken pre-emptive steps to block her from returning to helm the sequel, and the bad blood has continued to simmer ever since.
It goes without saying that the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ sequence is the 1991 cult classic’s most memorable scene, and during a 2023 podcast appearance, Spheeris was indignant at the suggestion that she was the one who lobbied to drop the Queen track from the scene in favour of a Guns N’ Roses song, mocking the leading man’s apparent desire to paint himself as the saviour of Wayne’s World‘s most iconic moment.
“Being the hero and genius that he is, he fought so hard against this asshole director to get ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in the movie,” Spheeris said, the sarcasm more than a little palpable. “That’s a big effing lie. You can kiss my big fat white butt. If it was his idea to put it in there, cool. Thanks, dude. Don’t say you had to fight for it, because you didn’t.”
That was far from the end of their disagreements during shooting, or even the mud-slinging that continued for years afterward, but at the end of the day, the director wants everyone to know that Myers didn’t have to go to war with either her or the studio to get ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ into the movie, and if he wants to claim otherwise, then, in her own words, he can kiss Spheeris’ arse.
