Mike Myers’ disastrous attempt at becoming a serious actor: “Something he soured on very quickly”
While comedy actors aren’t obligated to throw caution to the wind and see if they can hack it in a serious drama, enough of them have done it that it seems to be. Even Mike Myers gave it a shot, but you’d be forgiven for having no idea that it even happened, which says everything, really.
He’s obviously a talented writer and a gifted comic, something that was on full display on Saturday Night Live, the Wayne’s World duology, and the Austin Powers trilogy, but there weren’t many people who were desperate to see him make a concerted effort to reinvent himself as an acclaimed thespian.
Then again, those who knew him best wouldn’t have been surprised. Despite his signature big-screen style, Myers grew up dreaming of emulating John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut, who inspired him every bit as much as Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and other renowned comedians.
Sandwiched in between Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Shrek, two of his most popular and successful films, Myers gave it the ol’ college try. Needless to say, based on how he never played another major role in a dramatic picture at any point in the following three decades, he failed miserably.
He played Steve Rubell, the co-founder of the titular club, in writer and director Mark Christopher’s 54, and while he received some praise for an against-type performance, albeit one that saw him swamped in his now-signature prosthetics, the theatrical cut was butchered by Harvey Weinstein and widely panned.
After that, he made an even more bizarre pivot, playing a Dublin-dwelling drug dealer in the Irish flick, Pete’s Meteor. Joe O’Byrne’s drama failed to find a distributor, and despite premiering in 1998, it wouldn’t be until four years later that it was released in the United States, at which point it had been long forgotten.
“He did those two movies in an effort to say, ‘I want to be a real actor,'” one of his former representatives explained. “That was something he soured on very quickly, because he realised he could never subjugate himself to a director and a producer and give up control.”
According to those in the know, Myers always viewed Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey as his main competitors, since they were big-name comedy actors who could open a movie by themselves, which means it must have stung when they started winning rave reviews for dramatic performances, all while nobody gave a shit about his two tilts.
“A lot of actors think, ‘You like me, as opposed to, you like Wayne or Austin Powers,'” producer Hawk Koch suggested. “But when he played a straight character, it didn’t work.” Looking at how The Cat in the Hat, The Love Guru, and The Penataverate fared, you can’t say that he wasn’t onto something, with Myers’ signature characters proving more popular than the man himself as a filmmaking commodity.
