“I fucking hate you”: how Mike Myers and margarine turned a director’s daughter against them
He’s no stranger to getting caught up in feuds with his collaborators, but Mike Myers ended up creating a schism between parent and child, and it was all down to his desire to be constantly fed little snacks.
As ludicrous as that may sound in a microcosm, it’s not unheard-of behaviour from the Saturday Night Live veteran, who developed a reputation for being one of the most difficult, demanding, and petulant customers in mainstream comedy when his star continued to rise throughout the 1990s.
He was at odds with Dana Carvey for years, although the two have since mended their fences, and one of his bodyguards was adamant that they’d been fired for making direct eye contact. Meanwhile, his Cat in the Hat co-star, Amy Hill, suggested that Myers needed therapy after gaining first-hand exposure to his diva antics.
Spare a thought for poor Penelope Spheeris, too, who was effectively blackballed from returning to direct Wayne’s World 2 after daring to try and stand her ground against the classic comedy’s writer and star. The more time she spent with Myers, the more she realised that he needed to be treated with kid gloves at all times.
“He didn’t have any margarine for his bagel,” the filmmaker recalled. “And he’s hypoglycaemic, so you don’t want to get him in a bad mood. If you don’t have your blood sugar up, you get kind of grumpy, so I understand that he can’t help it. Whatever. Anyway, so I’m waiting and trying to get some margarine. But I mean, what a silly little thing.”
However, adding a twist in the tale, Myers’ representatives subsequently issued a statement denying that he was hypoglycaemic, which only serves to make him sound like an even bigger arsehole, to be honest. He didn’t baulk at the buttery bagel for medical reasons; he was just annoyed that margarine wasn’t an option.
Spheeris also shared how he spent hours inside his car afterwards, “talking to his manager about how we didn’t have any margarine and he was going to quit.” Obviously, that didn’t happen, and in an attempt to keep Myers constantly placated when he was in danger of throwing his toys out of the pram, the director enlisted her own daughter to act as a runner of sorts.
Her job was simple: whenever the actor needed a snack, she was dispatched to retrieve it. It was grunt work, sure, but well within her capabilities. And yet, it came at a cost: “To this day, I have this image of her sitting on this little cooler, looking at me, like, ‘Mom, I fucking hate you,'” Spheeris confessed, all because she’d been enlisted to ensure that Myers didn’t throw any more tantrums.
Presumably, a constant supply of margarine was kept on hand at all times after the first incident, with the crew no doubt walking on eggshells for the rest of the shoot in the off-chance that, heaven forbid, the star was presented with a buttered bagel by mistake, at which point all hell was sure to break loose.
