The one actor Mike Myers knew he couldn’t compete with: “What he does just blows me away every time”
Actors playing multiple characters in the same movie has been a staple of stage and screen for decades, but few modern stars have turned it into one of their signatures. For a while, though, Mike Myers was the pick of the bunch after emerging as one of Hollywood’s most popular comedians.
Not that he needed to tell anybody when it was patently obvious, but Peter Sellers was one of his biggest influences. Setting the benchmark for notching several characters – if not more – in the same film, Sellers built his career on the back of his endless malleability and ability to seamlessly disappear into several other skins.
Honing his skills on Saturday Night Live, where embodying countless creations is part of the job, Myers used an audience favourite as the springboard to cinematic success when Wayne’s World became an instant cult favourite. He pulled double duty in So I Married an Axe Murderer, and did the same thing again and scored his biggest hit yet when he portrayed the title character and his arch-nemesis Dr Evil in the Austin Powers franchise, adding Fat Bastard into the mix in the second and third entries.
That was the pinnacle for Myers, who basically fell off a cliff when The Love Guru did an incredible job of destroying his mainstream career in one fell swoop. Since then, he’s maintained a relatively low profile but continued doing what’s expected of him by making a number of cameo appearances that almost always require him to be unrecognisable.
An SNL alum who cracked the mainstream by making a habit of playing multiple characters sounds like an incredibly niche vocation, but there were two of them in Myers’ pomp. Depending on who gets asked, he may not have even been the best, which is entirely down to how any given audience member feels about Eddie Murphy utilising the same shtick in Coming to America, Vampire in Brooklyn, The Nutty Professor, and Norbit.
The two even worked together on the animated Shrek saga, and Myers wasn’t of the opinion that he could hold a candle to Murphy’s freewheeling style. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Eddie Murphy; I think he’s an absolutely brilliant comedian,” he told Cinema. “I’ve seen everything he’s done, and what he does just blows me away every time.”
“I really loved playing off the ideas that he would act out,” he continued of their improvisational riffing in the recording booth. “So it was great to watch Eddie be so hilarious, to interact with that, and then to kind of just sit and watch a master. So I just sort of played off of him. It was really great.”
Maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe it’s clear that there’s a finite shelf life for playing so many different parts in the same movie. After all, Myers and Murphy both flamed out after returning to the well so often in the face of diminishing critical and commercial returns, and there hasn’t really been anyone to come along and step into their shoes.
