Mike Myers: Is There Life After Wayne's World?

Back at the interview, Myers is saying, "The film's about a guy who is a poet--he's part of the coffeehouse culture in San Francisco, and he's afraid of getting married. He's a serial paranoid monogamist--"

"Wait, go back to the--"

"... he's a serial paranoid monogamist--"

"I know the type," I say.

". .. and he breaks up with girls at the point of commitment, based on his paranoia, which is his own self-deception about his own fears of marriage. He has to physicalize the fear by saying it was something that they were doing."

"Like what?" I ask.

"Like 'She was a thief,' or 'She hates my parents,' or 'She's physically dirty--she doesn't clean herself, she's just a very unclean person.'"

"Are your parents Jewish?" I ask, since I'm reminded of my Aunt Minnie, who single-handedly dismissed half the world because they weren't intimate enough with soap and water.

"No, but it's the classic dismissal of people who make you uncomfortable," Myers explains. '"They weren't clean.' It's a very medieval analysis of somebody, their personal hygiene. And then, finally, he meets a girl and she's great and he wants to make the plunge. But it turns out she's a serial killer."

"Serves him right," I mumble under my breath.

"Nancy Travis plays the girl, and I play the guy, plus my own Scottish father. Playing my own father was great. As with every movie I've ever done... wait, I mean, I've only made one before, God, don't I sound--" Suddenly he launches into a British accent: '"In all the movies I've made in my career...' What was I saying?"

"Beats me," I tell him.

All this time, Myers has been playing with one of those stirrers you use in your coffee. Now he picks up a football and starts tossing it up in the air. It makes me nervous.

"Please don't throw that at me," I plead.

"Why would I do that?" he asks.

"I don't know," I say. "It's the kind of thing my cousins used to do all the time. 'Think quick,' they'd yell, and then a basketball would come slamming down on my nose. I obviously wasn't quick enough."

"Don't worry," he assures me, but that's exactly what my cousins would have said.

"Did I tell you how I met Robin?" he asks about his fiancee, who, by the time this interview is printed, will be his wife. "It was the night I caught a puck at a hockey game. It was my first NHL puck. I thought it was a good omen."

"How does one catch a puck?" I wonder. "With your bare hands?"

"Sometimes the puck catches them, so to speak, and they're taken out on a stretcher. But I had caught this puck and it was a real icebreaker with Robin. She was intrigued by it. See, there only used to be six teams in the NHL. All those teams that were in from the beginning are called 'the original six.' That was my goal, to go to all the 'original six' games. When I went to Chicago to see one of them, that's the night I met Robin."

"God, this is so romantic I might puke."

"No," Myers insists, "it gets better. A few years later, I wanted to see the Boston Bruins, another 'original six' team, and Robin went with me. And at that game, she caught a puck! I was so proud of her--she caught it in the shoulder, and then I got the rebound, so I knew it must have hurt her, because they travel pretty quick. But she didn't complain, even though she had a big welt, and she was really excited. I made her stand up and show it to the crowd--that's what you do. And my best friend in Canada was watching the game, and he saw us. I think that was so cool."

"So for your wedding, will you hire the Rangers to walk Robin down the aisle?"

"No," he laughs. "By the way, I'm the honorary chairman of the Canadian Olympic [Hockey] Team. No, we're having a real small wedding. My schedule is so crazy, between the show and the film and everything else..."

"Babies on the horizon?" I ask.

"No, I love kids, I want to have kids, but it's just not the right time. Not now," Myers explains. "We can't even have a puppy. We love dogs, too, but I just don't want a dog to be trapped somewhere. I hate that. I'd hate to be a dog and be saying, 'What's going on here, are you guys going out? Am I coming? Are we moving? Can I stay here? I mean, I have bones buried. I have places that I sniff a lot.'" I don't know what to say, which is fine because Myers continues nonstop. "You can't try and eke a traditional life in a nontraditional business. I work six-day weeks on 'Saturday Night Live,' and then I'm going to start doing Wayne's World II."

"Does Robin come from a lifestyle that's compatible with yours?"

"Well, her mother is Linda Richman..."

I start to shriek. For my money, "Linda Richman" is Myers's most brilliant "SNL" creation, the Jewish talk show host, all hair and nails and wild gestures, who kvetches on her cable TV show "Coffee Talk" that her beautiful daughter, Robin, is about to marry a goy (non-Jew). Myers's Richman lives and breathes for her idol, Barbra Streisand.

"Is Robin's mother actually like Linda Richman?"

"Well, Robin's mother is named Linda Richman. And although I do her to the extreme, she loves it, and plays up to it when I'm around. She's hysterical."

While I have his attention, I ask where he's from, and when was he in England, for chrissakes?

"I'm from Canada," Myers begins. "From Toronto, Canada. I always hung out with people who made their own entertainment, who didn't rely on store-bought entertainment. My dad and my brothers and my best friend were very, very funny."

"So what kind of things did you do? I mean, did the Myers family put on family plays?"

"Yeah, sometimes we put on family plays. But the kitchen table is a big thing for me--the whole reason I got into comedy was to make girls laugh, in kitchens, at parties. Because it's such a tremendously gratifying medium. To this day, at parties, I always end up in the kitchen."

"Was your family--"

"And we used to be in our breakfast nook, the whole family, and it would be a combination of Parliament and Talmudic discussion. I did commercials for six years, from eight to 14. Gilda Radner played my mother in one of them! Then I became a punk rocker. After I graduated from school, I had an interview at Second City."

"Who was in the company with you?"

"I don't think you'd know anybody," he says.

"Nobody who's made it?" I ask.

He turns bright red. "Don't worry," I tell him, "I said that, not you."

"A whole bunch of very talented people," he says, and I'm reminded that it's not just cops and doctors who close ranks to protect one of their own. "And I don't say that in any sort of false modesty but they're truly, truly talented people."

Myers tells me about his move to England, then his second stint at Second City, and how it all eventually lead to "Saturday Night Live."

"So you've been working straight through since the day you graduated from high school? That's amazing ..."

"Hmmm? Yes. I was really lucky," he agrees. "And when I got to New York, I found out that Letterman tapes in the same building. And one of the perks of the show, the best perk, actually, was that they have season tickets to the Rangers games."

"Jesus, it's like you died and went to heaven."

"Exactly," Myers concurs. "The universe just aligned right. And then Paramount wanted to do a movie with me, which was nice, and I've always wanted to do Wayne as a movie character. When I first did it I always had a movie in mind. I had done it on Canadian TV and then I did it on 'Saturday Night Live' and then, when they talked with me about the movie, I said, 'Sure, I'd like to do "Wayne's World" as a movie.' And we did that, and it opened on February 14, 1992. And the rest is history."

"I'll say," I say. "It certainly did great--"

"It's weird," he says, apropos of nothing, "my life right now is a combination of Fantastic Voyage and Das Boot."

Give me a second here while I try to figure this out. Nope, I can't. I ask Myers if he can.

"Well, you know, I mean, it's a great submarine, but I need some air. Sometimes I need to surface and ... you've got no idea of the impact of anything, up or down. With Wayne's World, we just sent it out to the cosmos, and what came back was unbelievable. More than that, even. And with Axe Murderer, well, we'll see."

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Comments

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