Mike’s World

After the first screening of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the 100-person test audience was asked to raise their hands if they were familiar with James Bond. Two hands went up. The studio, New Line, was concerned: This was a movie packed with parody and references to the British spy franchise, and the audience response prompted them to tell creator and star Mike Myers that the film needed massive rewrites and reshoots to be salvaged. Myers said “no.” “Don’t release the film,” he said. “That’s the film.” Austin Powers ended up hitting theaters in 1997 in the form he wanted, launching a franchise of films that have grossed more than $700 million worldwide.

That passion, and Myers’s unabating conviction in his creative vision, is at the heart of the public’s connection with his characters over the past three-plus decades. Myers commits to his characters — fully embodying such memorable personae as Wayne Campbell, Austin Powers, and Shrek, among countless others — and is willing to fight for the smallest details. His success on both fronts elevates him to a short list of icons who create comedy that’s deeply specific to their own sense of humor while resonating with audiences on a global scale.

Possibly the best expression of Myers’s comic influence and enduring legacy is the number of instantly recognizable expressions he has added to the cultural lexicon: “Excellent.” “Yeah, baby!” “One millllllion dollars.” “Schwing.” “Donkey!” “Get in my belly!” “Not.” Character after character, project after project, he manages to tap into a distinctive concept and calibrate it just so, creating something lasting. That singular body of work is why we chose Myers as the fifth recipient of our annual Honorary Degree as a Master of Culture, which was awarded in November at Vulture Festival in Los Angeles ahead of the career-spanning conversation below.

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.

Here’s an example of you playing Wayne from 40 years ago on the Canadian show City Limits.

That was improvised at 3:30 in the morning on Canadian TV. He was a good friend of mine, Christopher Ward, who’s in the band Ming Tea with Susanna Hoffs, who’s Jay’s wife.

At that point, you had been doing Wayne for a few years. 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.

What was your relationship to Saturday Night Live before you got cast? 
I moved to England in 1983. SNL aired there, but I never watched because I had one of those top-loading VCRs and it was on at exactly the same time as the Toronto Maple Leafs game. I could only tape one thing, and of course it was going to be the Toronto Maple Leafs. In England, nobody had heard of Saturday Night Live. I went with a group of friends to get cheeseburgers, and I said, “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger,” and they’re going, “Why did you say that three times?” I was like, Hmm.

When I came back to Canada, I was in a cab with Dave Foley from The Kids in the Hall, and in those days in Toronto, we had hilarious cab dispatchers that you could hear in the back seat. This one guy from Eastern taxi would go, “Okay, Steeles and Eglinton,” and if a driver took it, he’d go, “Give that man a baloney sandwich.” That was his whole thing. Then he started saying, after he gave an address, “Isn’t that special?” And I turned to Dave and said, “What the fuck is that? That’s really funny.” And he said, “That’s a line from Dana Carvey.” I said, “Who’s Dana Carvey?” and he said, “He’s on Saturday Night Live. You should check it out.”

So I checked it out and thought, Oh my God, that’s really funny. But I had no idea. When I got to Saturday Night Live and saw how fucking good these guys were, I was scared shitless. I had an anxiety attack. Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Jan Hooks; it was unbelievable.

How did Wayne help get you cast? 
By a technicality, I was at a Toronto Second City reunion show — I’m an alumni even though I’d just gone to Second City in Chicago. All these famous people were performing, and I was on right before the break, at the point when the crowd was starting to get bored: Is Robin Williams gonna show up? the audience would hope. I did my sketch, “Wayne and Nancy,” where I came up from the audience, and it fucking killed. It was chair stomps and whistles; it was a jet taking off. I don’t know what happened, but the audience just loved it. Then I did an improv at the end with Del Close, who’s one of the founding members of Second City. Two weeks later, I’m in Chicago and I get a call from Lorne Michaels and he said, “They say you do a Wayne character.”

It’s common for cast members to come to SNL with characters but then that character has to be incorporated into a sketch. It’s interesting that right away, you’re like, “Wayne has a public-access TV show, and now he has a sidekick.” How did you flesh it out to make it more than just “I have this person”?
I was originally gonna set it in Scarborough, Ontario. One of the writers was from Chicago, and after I described Scarborough to her, she said, “That’s Aurora, Illinois.” I said, “Aurora it is!”

I’d always wanted to make Wayne’s World a movie. I saw it as a world. I think that comedy is production design and comedy movies are worlds. They’re immaculate universes that they bring you into. I purposely called it Wayne’s World because I love Pee-wee’s Big Adventure — oh my God, what a masterpiece — and Jacques Tati and the TV series The Monkees. I love being immersed in a comedic world. I’d written it out as a movie before I even got to Saturday Night Live, and I was trying to figure out a way to have the brilliant Dana Carvey be in my sketch. That was about it.

Here’s the famous scene from Wayne’s World, where you literally do see Wayne’s world as he is driving through Aurora with his friends listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

[Crowd applause]
I didn’t die recently, did I?

In the first script for Wayne’s World, the song in that scene was Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” How did you land on “Bohemian Rhapsody?”
Well, it’s one of the greatest rock songs ever. It has a strange operatic quality. I loved Queen, and in our car, we had a Dodge Dart — a light-blue Dodge Dart that had a vomit stain that we chipped into the shape of Elvis. And everybody was assigned a “Galileo.” That was the big thing, and we had fights if you took my “Galileo.”

It was originally going to be a long operetta. My thinking was that when you see Wayne’s World on Saturday Night Live, it’s the basement. So in the movie, we will literally take you up to the top. I thought it should be, in order to illustrate the world and the other people who were going to be in it, an operetta. My version of it was three times longer, where every bit of it was “Is Phil gonna go, is he gonna puke?” and then it got chopped and chopped and chopped.

So the story is —
They wanted Guns N’ Roses.

The studio wanted Guns N’ Roses.
I am a Guns N’ Roses fan. I just didn’t have anything funny for it.

Can you bring us back to a moment in one of those meetings where someone says, “It should be Guns N’ Roses,” and what you felt to know it can’t be?
I think having Liverpool parents, there’s a built-in “Fuck you” quality that I now see in my children. I just had a knowing, you know what I mean?

It is very odd, I have to say, to sit here at 61 with crazy white hair wearing a suit and all this stuff. I never thought I’d ever be discovered. I thought I was going to have to discover myself. And I just thought, This is what I want to do, and if it doesn’t work out, fine. But I did know what I wanted to do, and I did know that I was gonna fight. I wasn’t gonna be mean, I wasn’t gonna be ugly, but I was not gonna be talked out of my vision because I thought I’d probably only get one turn at bat. Why not go down swinging?

So that’s what I wanted to do. And to Lorne’s credit, he said [in Lorne voice] “The boy has a passion for it. Let’s get his song.”

After the surprise success of the first Wayne’s World, how did you process the less enthusiastic response to the sequel?
I didn’t want to do a second one. I didn’t think it necessitated a sequel. Jay and I spent a tremendous amount of time with Austin Powers determining why we wanted the audience to come back. We wanted to honor them for having seen the first one and then the first two. Not to be immodest, but the third did more than the second and the second did more than the first. We made sure that you understand why you’re being brought back to this world. I didn’t know why Wayne’s World needed to come back.

I had an entirely different idea. It was gonna be that Wayne gets his own country and it’s the first heavy-metal state. He comes across a piece of paper from the Revolutionary War that said that Aurora never signed on to be part of America. Wayne wants to put on a rock show, the local elders don’t want to, and Wayne goes, “Too bad, we are the Kingdom of Waynedavia.” The first heavy-metal state.

I’ve seen that it was inspired by Passport to Pimlico, a post-WWII comedy about a part of London that’s revealed to be its own nation.
I said to everyone at Paramount at the time, “There is a movie called Passport to Pimlico. I’ll write this, but you have to get the rights for it.” They said, “Fine, go ahead and write it.” I mentioned Passport to Pimlico in every meeting. Then a new administration comes into Paramount and they go, “Uh, we never got the rights to it and you’re shooting in ten weeks.” And so I rewrote it in ten weeks, and that’s the story of Wayne’s World 2. I had a choice: Do I go, “Fuck, I don’t want to do it?” Or do I salvage the jokes that would have worked in the other one and make it about Waynestock,” which was going to be the climax of the movie anyways? But I wanted it to be like the Ministry of Being Partied Out, the Department of Being Hassled by Your Parents, a clinic where you’ve got a shitty song stuck in your head, all that stuff. Super, super local.

That movie came out in 1993, and you left SNL early in 1995. Then there was a period of inactivity. Can you talk about where you were emotionally and creatively and how the Austin Powers character emerged?
Right around that time, my dad passed away. Since I had lived in England, I had that as a reference point, and one day I was just walking down the street and thought, Whatever happened to swingers? Whatever happened to “She’s a sexy stew!” or “They’re twins?” or being from Sweden or anything like that? You know, all that stuff that now you’re like, “Mmm, really?”

I loved James Bond. And I thought that’s what I wanna do, a character like that. I studied James Bond movies inside and out, and I knew all the tropes. And more than James Bond — which was at a little bit of a nadir; the series wasn’t so popular at that moment — I really wanted to do a parody of spy spoofs. I wanted it to have Coca-Cola reds and AT&T blues, Kodak yellows in this world, and then Dr. Evil’s world would be gray and black and sharp.

It’s commonly believed that Dr. Evil was based on Lorne Michaels. When you had the idea of Dr. Evil, did you think of Lorne right away?
No, it was Donald Pleasance forever. I’d done a show with Neil Mullarkey, who was my comedy partner. We did a sketch called “Dr. Wicked,” which was like a puppet show, only we were people. And I had at one point wanted to do a one-man show of a generic Bond villain, An Evening With … some Bond villain talking about things like “It’s really hard to get sharks with laser beams!” The truth behind the clichés. Like, if you have a private army, well presumably you’d need a private cafeteria for the army, too! All the questions that never get answered on those. I was going to put it up at Edinburgh and ended up doing a show with Mullarkey.

And the Lorne of it?
The Lorne of it is just a little tiny overlay. I’m Canadian. He’s Canadian. He had an educated Canadian accent, and I have a Scarborough accent. One time he goes, “Mike, do you want to come up to the Hamptons?” I was like, “Am I fired?” I went, and it was like, “That’s Mick’s room, or do you want Keith’s room?” And I was like, “Either’s fine. Couch works! The car works!”

So anyway, we’re there and he has this big dinner with everybody. I’d never been to the Hamptons, and here it’s all people who are captains of industry but also people who own elemental things, like, “That’s Bill Smith, he owns bay salt.” And my joke was, “There’s the man who invented the question mark. And over there, he owns Lake Ontario. Next to him is the man who invented the pregnant pause, or so I … think.”

Meanwhile, I’m like “Hi! I’m from Scarborough!” And so the first thing I said as a joke was, “Gee, Mister Gatsby, it’s so great of you to invite me! All these people are so crazy! I see those parties across the lake and that big green light!” It got a big laugh, and Lorne looked around like, “Hmm. My latest creation.”

All Bond villains tell you everything. They all have an affliction. The Dr. Evil pinkie was originally that he was unfrozen but his hand was ten minutes late, and so he’s constantly warming up his hand, right? And then he goes, “Look at me, I’m a freak!” and he’s in no way a freak.

The “Get in my belly” Fat Bastard run was not in the original script. What was that day like when you were in character improvising as him?
Fun! Making comedies is fun, dude!

One of the first things I said as Fat Bastard was “I ate a baby,” just because I like the words ate and baby. We would run the scene as scripted and then do a “shizzies and gizzies” take. Shits and giggles, one that’s more improvised.

Your movies are filled with people who speak using distinctive language. Catchphrases have fallen out of favor in comedy, but you’ve consistently been able to create them throughout your career. Where does that skill come from?
I’m fascinated by how people talk, but I’ve never designed a catchphrase. Like “Get in mah belly?” That was an improv. It wasn’t like “Ladies and gentlemen, my next catchphrase … ‘Get in mah belly!’ Very good!”

I’ll say one thing about catchphrases. Dana used to do this really fucking funny thing — he’d try to torture Lorne. He’d go, “Mike, I got another sketch for you!” “What?” “It’s a catchphrase. Just go with it.” So he invented a catchphrase, which was “Hey Bill! What are you doing? Well I got to got to got to go!” Just to fuck with Lorne. Then because Lorne’s so smart, he would, halfway through, go [in Lorne voice] “Rigggggghhhhht” and then we’d go into the next thing. So … I don’t think you can invent catchphrases in a lab.

Goldmember was inspired by a Real Sex episode on HBO and seeing a Dutch man who ran a swingers club. How does that happen?
I was obsessed with that episode. I knew it could be something — often the Bond villains have another Bond villain. I also had a Dutch soccer coach, and I didn’t realize they shush when they talk. “Thish short of thing like thish.”

So as Fat Bastard, you say “donkey,” and you say “donkey” in another movie …
Where’s this going?

The Scottish accent we all associate with Shrek was not the first one you used. Before you talk about the voice you landed on for Shrek, what other accents did you try?
I originally did it in a very thick Canadian accent. Thicker than I have. It was the craziest thing: I went to the premiere of Saving Private Ryan, and Jeffrey Katzenberg comes up to me afterward in the lobby and brings his daughters, who then do the dance sequence from Austin Powers. This was after such a heavy movie, and I was in tears, because my parents were in World War II, and I was shell-shocked, and then they’re doing the dance, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s great. (READ A ROOM.)”

And then he said, “Mike, would you ever do an animated movie?” and I go “Sure.” And he goes, “Well, we have an animated movie. It’s called Shrek.” And I go, “Well, that’s the worst fucking title I’ve ever heard in my life.” It’s the sound you make after drinking too many Molson Canadians. “Agh! Shreck!” So he said, “Just come down and see it.” So I saw it and I liked that it turned fairy tales on its head. I thought that was really, really smart. The fairy tale is a Eurocentric form, dealing with class, right? To say, “Yes, we know it’s Eurocentric but it can be more inventive and inclusive,” and to have an African American voice in Donkey in it, I thought it was brilliant. I assumed that ogres were working people in that world, and since I’m working class — well, not anymore — but having grown up working class, I thought a Canadian accent would be great. So I tried it and just didn’t connect to it. I didn’t do a very good job. Then I thought I’d do something like “Lothar of the Hill People” because that was the character I did in D&D, and Jeffrey was cool with it. Nothing had been animated, and I thought, I’m not connecting to that either.

Now as a sidebar: They had created this maquette, a little statue made of clay of all the characters, and Shrek looked exactly like Chris Farley. I was at my third meeting, and I go, “Guys, was this offered to Chris Farley and then he died?” Everyone looked at their shoes. I said, “No, but seriously, really?” (Pause.) “No.” “Oh, okay.” I get in the parking lot, and I go, “I think this was Farley’s.” It was! I was right, but they didn’t tell me.

How did you end up persuading Katzenberg to let you take another shot at the voice?
I said, “Listen, Farquaad’s got an English accent and Eddie’s hilarious in it with his voice. Scottish people are working class, and it’s in that Euroworld, you know what I mean?” Jeffrey said, “No, I like what you’re doing.” I said, “I don’t, Jeffrey.” He goes, “No, it’s fine. We have to spend so much money to reanimate!” Not true. It was all wire-frame where it’s like [imitating the motions of the first render] “Donkey! What’s going on there?” You know what I mean? So they’d spent some money but not millions. I was born at night but not last night!

And I was like “Jeffrey, I know you haven’t spent that much money.” So I called Steven Spielberg, who’s part of the thing, and I said, “Steven, I want this to be good. I love the theme of ‘You are beautiful to me.’ Because, listen, I’ve never traded on my looks. I’m a comedy actor, I’m not like Rob Lowe. When you see Rob Lowe, you just start to laugh. And I’ll say, “Rob, holy fuck,” and Rob goes, “I know.” Right? Because he knows.

So I always thought, What if I could play a guy who learns to love himself and find himself beautiful? I can really connect to that. So if he’s Scottish, I get that. It fits with Farquaad, who’s English, it fits with the Euro-thing. And the other thing is ogres have tempers, and so do Scottish people. [In a Scottish accent] “That’s so great, it’s so great to see you coming over like that, NOW TAKE YOUR FUCKING SHOES OFF!” That flash anger I knew could be inherently comedic. It is what an ogre would be.

And so I said, “Let me just try it one more time.” He said, “It’s gonna cost millions.” I said, “I’m not getting paid more to do this. Let’s do it.” We did it, and later on, I got a letter from Steven Spielberg saying, “Thank you so much for caring.” It’s framed in my house. He said, “You were absolutely right, you were 100 percent more connected to it.” And Jeffrey came to like it, which is fine. Now here we are. I saw another movie with dragons — and the guy’s Scottish! That’s all I’m saying. How to Tame Your Dragon, is that’s what it’s called?

Train.
Train. “Tame” in Canada.

Have you started work on Shrek 5? Have you talked to Eddie and Cameron about it?
I have. But I don’t get to see them until later. I love Donkey so much. I want Donkey to live in my house. I love that character, and I kind of enjoy not seeing Eddie, although he’s hilarious and lovely and very nice, a generous human being. I love Donkey so much that seeing and hearing him gets me excited. Then I see Eddie at the press junkets and stuff, and it’s fun. He’s a cool dude. Cooler than I’ll ever be.

In the last couple decades, you’ve done some dramatic films. Inglourious Basterds. Bohemian Rhapsody. How do you approach those roles?
Well, it was an absolute joy to work with Quentin Tarantino. I love his work. He wanted it to be a genre study. So he … God, what’s the name of the actor who played Alfred in the original TV Batman? I should know his name. [An audience member says, “Alan Napier.”] Alan Napier!

Tarantino sent me some stuff, so I studied Alan Napier. Then I met with the makeup people. I had all these ideas and suggested a makeup test, and they said makeup was already done. I said, “I have ideas,” and they said, “This is what Quentin wants,” and I was like, “Okay, yes sir. I serve at the pleasure of the president!” We were doing a scene at Nazi headquarters, which was weird. On my first day there, it’s the scene where the French artist is painting Hitler, and Quentin said, “Mike, come in, you’re gonna love it.” And there’s a guy with [mimes a Hitler mustache], and Hitler’s speaking [does German gibberish], and I’m like, “What the fuck am I in for? That’s Hitler!” It was crazy. But anyway, with that character, I was doing a genre. [Noise from offstage of something falling.] You’re so shocked by that! “A genre! What? You can’t play a genre!”

In Bohemian Rhapsody, you play a music executive complaining about the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” and how it is too long and indulgent. It’s obviously a full-circle moment for you, but it also felt aligned with a theme of a lot of your work, which is the struggle between the business side of creativity and the people creating it. A recurring theme during our conversation has been you standing up for your vision. As you look at your career, how do you think of your relationship to the business side of show business?
I love show, less enamored with business. I’ve received some of the greatest notes from studios. I’ve learned so much from Lorne Michaels. If I hadn’t done Wayne’s World, I would never have been able to know how to do Austin Powers. Lorne’s generous with telling you the black arts of it, the realpolitik of how things get made, the pragmatism.

I sit here at 61, I have three kids, I live in Vermont, I watch a lot of soccer and a lot of hockey. The Paul Bunyan–ing of my creative struggles is amusing to me, because mostly I just said, “Guys, I just don’t see it that way.” There’s very little friction; it’s mostly just conviction. It’s a lot to ask an audience to sit in the dark and not talk about themselves. You have to give them the best that you know you can do. I never thought I’d get this shot, and I didn’t want to blow it. And so I just had an instinct about “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Wayne’s World and an instinct about Shrek being Scottish.

Most recently you did a miniseries for Netflix called The Pentaverate, about a good-natured global conspiracy in which you played eight characters. I found it really refreshing. There are few comedy shows and movies these days that are so character-based. There are fewer comedies being made in movies in general, in theaters at least, and those that are aren’t built around big characters. What is it about character-based comedy that has been a drive for you?
I think how people talk and how they react is fascinating. Henri Bergson, in his essay “Laughter,” talked about how comedy is when man acts as machine. And his belief is that laughter is a nervous response to the realization of your own mortality. We’re laughing at death. Every culture has it. Why? Usually it deals with inflexibility, either of the subject or of the person viewing the subject. The object or the subject. Inflexibility is the staple of comedy.

Jay has a great expression, which is you see a guy walking down the street eating a banana. He finishes eating, he throws the peel behind him. There’s another guy walking behind him. He doesn’t see the banana peel. Cut to the angle of the relationship. He goes a step, misses the banana peel, and then crosses the street and gets hit by a banana truck. You are unadaptable to the possibility that it could get worse. Another one of Jay’s theories is to exceed the expectation, by a lot.

In Austin Powers, one of my favorite jokes is the slow-motion steamroller chase. It can only exist with the key shot, which is the wide shot. That shows you the spatial relationship between the guy and the slow-moving thing, and yet he’s acting as if it’s fast. “No! No!” That inflexibility on his part, we recognize him to be a machine, he’s matter, he’s gonna die, and we laugh.

This is the thing. Character offers you so much of both your expectation of how the character might react and the character surprising you. That’s one of the things about Wayne having more knowledge than he should — or Alice Cooper knowing all this history, or Aerosmith going “Until the Soviet-era apparatchiks …”

Speaking of characters, do you think you’d make an Austin Powers 4?
Yes.

Follow-up: How close are we to that happening?
I can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of a project, should it exist or not exist.

More immediately, the SNL 50th anniversary is in February. Are you planning on doing something?
Has anybody here worked at SNL? Do we think that they have anything planned yet? I would even question that it’s that date or that it’s gonna be on television! They’ll probably do a semaphore version! No, they’re very last minute. It’s an underrehearsed Broadway opening once a week.

One of my favorite things you did was The Gong Show. You had this huge movie career and then you just did The Gong Show in 2017 disguised as a character and didn’t tell anyone you were doing it. At this point, you’ve done so much, you’ve had so many successes. What excites you?
Well, that excited me. I loved The Gong Show when it originally aired in the late ’70s. To me that was punk rock. I never missed it. It was the internet before the internet, you know what I mean? One contestant’s name was Melt It, and he would melt a block of ice 50 different ways. That was his act. You’d go, “Oh, this is gonna be sucky,” but then the audience was like “39!” He got some road salt, would lick it, take a blowtorch to it! There was such a wide range. It was all amateur hour.

One of the things about growing up in a Liverpool house is if I had a friend who wasn’t funny, my dad would say, “Oh, he can’t come around anymore! He’s not funny!” And if you went into a Liverpool house, you needed to have a song, a story, or a joke. I never lost my love for that. I’ve successfully instilled it in my children: If they say something mean and it’s funny, it’s fine. Basically. So when I was asked, “Do you want to do The Gong Show?” I said, “Yes, I do! And there’s a British comedian character I want to do it as.” I fucking loved doing that show. That was like summer camp for me.

It’s hard to process one’s success while you’re doing it. A movie comes out, and you’re working on the next one. Do you remember a moment where you were able to stop and realize the impact of your work?
Just the fact that you guys are here is amazing. What’s so weird is that it didn’t go away, you know? I still see memes and stuff. We made stuff that we wanted to see. That’s all I ever do. I wanted to see The Gong Show. I love secret societies, I’m obsessed with them, and Netflix went, “Yeah, do it!” and I was able to do it.

I got the last letter that George Harrison ever wrote. It was a fan letter to me. Growing up in a house from Liverpool, the Beatles were the best of my gene pool. They’re famous famous, and their music is breathed by the gods for us. I received the letter the day he died, and it was, “Dear Mike, I’ve been searching all Europe for a mini-you doll, I can’t find one. Anyways, great laughs. Keep it up, George Harrison.”

And I have to say life’s been hard since then because that was the greatest. But about five years ago, I went to Buckingham Palace. A friend of mine got us to go into the gate, though not into the house. I was thrilled. You wear a suit, you go through security clearance, and I’m sitting there and then the band comes out. Guys with flags, they stop, and then all of a sudden, they play the Austin Powers theme! They played it for me! They knew I was coming! And then a guy comes by with a flag, and they’re not supposed to talk, and he goes, “I bet you’ve heard that song before, Mr. Myers!” And I cried like a motherfucker! I couldn’t believe it.

One year when I came back to Canada for Christmas, my dad said, “What are you doing? Are you working?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve got this comedy partner named Neil Mullarkey.” And my dad said, “Well, presumably Bill Shenanigans was busy!”