How Paul McCartney inspired Mike Myers’ in ‘Shrek’: “A lot of heart and sweetness”
Mike Myers has made a career out of sidling up to the line where good taste meets bad and gleefully leaping over it. Sometimes, it works. The first Austin Powers movie really went for it, and although its relentlessly juvenile sensibility doesn’t work for everyone, it excels at its own game. Other times, it does not work at all. The Love Guru, to pick one example, is one of the lowest common denominator comedies of the past two decades, which is a remarkably difficult classification to earn.
Any goodwill that Myers might have garnered for Austin Powers was shattered when he insisted upon playing an American brought up in a Hindu ashram who pretends to be a guru in order to have sex with lots of women. In Myers’s head, that is apparently all it takes. The film cost a boatload of money, made only a handful, and was panned, as it deserved. Its failure sent the mastermind behind it into a career tailspin and made it easy to forget that, once upon a time, he was actually capable of some pretty wholesome comedy.
2001’s Shrek remains one of the greatest animated movies ever made (according to subjective data), and Myers’s voice performance as the titular Scottish ogre has a lot to do with its unusual charm. Unlike many protagonists in kids’ movies, Shrek is gruff, impatient, and kind of a jerk, but underneath it all, he’s as sentimental as the rest of us, and when he falls in love with the imprisoned and betrothed Princess Fiona, he gets downright sappy.
When asked in an interview with Metrograph about where he got the inspiration for the character, Myers said that the bulk of finding any of his characters is music. “Music has been everything,” he said, explaining that with Shrek, the genre was bagpipe music but the specific anthem to which he would return again and again was ‘Mull of Kintyre’ by Paul McCartney and Wings. “It has a lot of heart and sweetness,” he said.
Apparently, he hadn’t thought of the character as Scottish in the beginning and had planned to just use his native Canadian accent, but he ultimately decided that it didn’t fit with the rest of the cast. “Eddie [Murphy, who played Donkey] brought an African American voice to fairy tales, which are a Eurocentric form,” he said, “John Lithgow [who played Lord Farquaad] brought an English upper-class [accent]. I thought the Canadian accent would clash too much; it sounds too much like Fiona [voiced by Cameron Diaz].”
A Scottish accent, he reasoned, would add a medieval flair to the proceedings as well, which fit with the setting. Luckily, Steven Spielberg, who ran DreamWorks, understood exactly where he was coming from, and the unexplained Scottish brogue won the day.
Scottish viewers of the film would no doubt take some umbrage at the revelation that the Canadian actor used a song from an English-American band as inspiration for the character, but then again, they probably weren’t thrilled about having their accent used to personify an ogre, either. Ultimately, though, Shrek is a hero that any of us would be proud to claim.
