At Vulture Festival a few weeks ago, my colleague Jesse David Fox staged a live taping of his Good One podcast with the one and only Mike Myers, he of comedy and Canadian royalty. They had a sweeping chat about his career — Austin Powers, SNL, Wayne’s World, Shrek, all of it — and here’s a brief excerpt from that conversation:
To start, as we name you a Master of Culture, I’ll ask: What does culture mean to you? How do you feel being part of it?
“What does culture mean to me” might be the most open-ended question I’ve ever been asked in my life.
I grew up in government-subsidized housing near Toronto. My parents were immigrants from England. Both of them met in amateur dramatics, and my dad revered comedians. My son’s name is Spike, based on Spike Milligan, and my dad’s name was Spike as well. Culture is everything.
I never thought I’d be a part of culture. Here in the crowd right now is Jay Roach, the director of Austin Powers. He’s a brother from another mother, a fantastic filmmaker, and somebody who, when I moved to Los Angeles, actually went to movies. Jay is one of the most cultured people I’ve ever met, and I didn’t realize how much being around cultured people meant to me. It doesn’t require any money. My production company is called No Money Fun Films because I don’t think access to money or capital keeps you from culture.
For me, culture is that when a comedy was on at home, our house smelled nicer. It was a universal truth. It binds you to the rest of the world. Freud said that laughter is an ensemble process. I love the Toronto Maple Leafs, I love Liverpool Football Club, and I love going first weekend to see comedies.
The character of Wayne Campbell in Wayne’s World emerged from your early years on Canadian television. Who were you when you came up with the first versions of Wayne?
I was a punk rocker in Toronto. In Canada, instead of saying, “Punks rule, okay?!” they say “Punks rule, okay Mom?!” We’ll gum you more than bite you. But people all around me were into heavy metal, and it struck me that the suburban heavy-metal thing was universal — or, at least, in North America. One of the things about starting out in show business up in Canada is there’s no money in it, which is kind of great because in a weird way it makes you experiment more. And things you do in Canada don’t go against your career, you know? It’s a place to get your 10,000 hours.
How were you approaching him?
I wanted the character to have knowledge you wouldn’t expect he might have.
I have a few comedy heroes. Peter Sellers is absolutely one of them. He committed. He saw no difference between dramatic acting and comedic acting. He thought that true comedy acting is 99.99 percent dramatic acting with .01 percent commentary, which is to say you make it slightly heightened. You think about the great Phil Hartman. Comedy is like gold — it has to have a little bit of impurity in it, and his was minute. It was total commitment. But comedy acting has chord changes between moods faster than what exists in life. If you’re doing a dramatic play, you have to build up to the change. In comedy, it can be “Ha ha ha, now get the fuck out.” That change is the .01 percent impurity where it’s not verisimilitude. There is exaggeration.
Growing up in Scarborough, Ontario, I got great marks — I wrote a contrast-and-compare essay on The Spy Who Loved Me and Joseph Campbell’s cosmogonic monomyth cycle. But at the same time, I didn’t want to hang out with the eggheads. I wanted to hang out with the party animals. And so I tried to infuse this idea that Wayne has much more knowledge than you find yourself adaptable to the possibility that he could have.
Over time, did the character become more like you?
No. It actually became more sentimental and about how I love Canada.
You can read the whole thing here.
