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Mike Myers recently told Vulture that rumors claiming Dr. Evil from the “Austin Powers” film franchise is based on “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels are simply not true. Myers was a cast member on “SNL” from 1989 to 1995. Considering “Austin Powers” originated as a James Bond spoof, the inspiration for Dr. Evil was always Blofeld actor Donald Pleasance from “You Only Live Twice” and not Myers’ “SNL” boss.
“The Lorne of it is just a little tiny overlay,” Myers explained. “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,” he continued. “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.’
Popular on Variety The braggadocious nature of the Hamptons found its way into the creation of Dr. Evil, as “all Bond villains tell you everything. They all have an affliction.”
The “Austin Powers” franchise launched in 1997, two years after Myers exiting “SNL.” The comedian was no stranger to the big screen having previously adapted his popular “SNL” sketch “Wayne’s World” into two movies, but Myers told Vulture that he never wanted to make the 1993 sequel.
“I didn’t want to do a second one. I didn’t think it necessitated a sequel,” Myers said. “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…I didn’t know why ‘Wayne’s World’ needed to come back.”
“I had an entirely different idea,” Myers continued about the sequel. “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.”
Myers’ idea for the sequel was based on the movie “Passport to Pimlico,” so he needed the rights to it in order to make his plan a reality. He says the studio never got the rights even though development on the sequel was underway and shooting was supposed to start in 10 weeks. Myers had to rewrite the entire sequel into something he wasn’t too passionate about.
Head over to Vulture’s website to read Myers’ full interview in its entirety.
