The director Mike Myers hated at first sight: “He was always upset, always angry”
Comedians can often be a tricky bunch, and when you’ve got someone like Mike Myers, who had his moments of pettiness and insecurity that earned him the dreaded ‘difficult’ reputation, paired with a director he disliked from the first moment they met, it’s a match made in heaven.
After all, this is the same Myers who sabotaged Penelope Spheeris out of returning to helm Wayne’s World 2 because she had the temerity to screen an early cut of the movie to a test audience without his express approval, which resulted in a second screening, this time with 11 pages of Myers-written notes, and the confirmation that she wouldn’t be back for the sequel.
It isn’t just restricted to filmmakers, either, with Myers irritating several co-stars through antics that could generously be described as diva-like, not to mention the allegations that a security guard was fired because they had the complete and utter nerve to make eye contact with the Austin Powers creator.
Myers’ second feature, So I Married an Axe Murderer, managed to start off on a worse footing, with the leading man taking an “immediate dislike” to Thomas Schlamme, who he described as being “anti-comedy,” which wasn’t ideal when the production was, in fact, a comedy.
That wasn’t the only issue to befall the shoot, which eventually devolved into mud-slinging between Myers and Neil Mullarkey. Both of them claimed to have made significant contributions to the screenplay, but neither of them were credited, which caused plenty of friction between the long-time friends.
The actor would frequently refuse to leave his trailer to report to the set, Schlamme constantly found himself trying to appease a star who was becoming increasingly erratic, and things reached a point where Myers wouldn’t come to the editing suite during post-production if he knew the film’s director was present.
However, despite being so volatile, he didn’t piss everyone off. “Literally, he would be sitting in his trailer writing the scenes, and the other actors wouldn’t have had the benefit of a half-hour with their lines before they shot their scenes,” someone who’d worked on So I Married an Axe Murderer told Variety.
That might sound nightmarish, but that wasn’t entirely the case. “He was always upset, always angry,” they added, not painting a particularly brilliant picture. “But as incredibly difficult as he was, and he was like a child the whole time, I believe that, on many levels, Mike was right. He understood his audience.”
That wasn’t entirely true, either, since the movie underperformed with critics and at the box office, something he didn’t forget. Myers’ former agent intoned that “he has no worse nightmare than being back where he was with Axe Murderer,” which evidently did nothing to curb his tyrannical habits.
