Mike Myers certainly hopes so. While waiting for his new movie to come out, the self-professed comedic actor and "Saturday Night Live" star explains why he'd hate to be a dog, reveals what it's like being a "low-grade psychic," and tells how marriage can be viewed as "the waiting room for death."
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When I was in college, I took a job selling encyclopedias door-to-door. We had a 10-day training period (which, as it turned out, was eight more than the job would last, but I didn't know that at the time), during which we were supposed to memorize a five-page spiel about how these books could change your life and transform your idiot child into a prodigy.
Every morning, each of the 12 trainees would have to stand in front of the class and recite all that we had committed to memory. Hambone that I was, I had the whole thing down pat by day four, and would recite it from beginning to end as if it were my Oscar acceptance speech. My favorite part was on page two, where we'd have to clap, loudly, and say, "Let me make this crystal clear..."
The thing was, I only knew the spiel in its entirety... if you stopped me in the middle, I had to go back to the beginning and start again. None of it had really penetrated, so I would have to spew it back whole.
I hadn't thought about that job in years, until I sat down to interview Mike Myers.
Myers, whose characters on "Saturday Night Live" had already made him into a cult hero when one of them, Wayne, became a movie icon that made him, overnight, into a household name, is hard to get a handle on. At 29, he's funny and glib and willing to talk about almost anything. But it's as if an inner tape is playing, and if you derail him, he has to start from the beginning. It's not that I couldn't get a word in edgewise, it's that when I would talk, Myers would sort of disengage until it was his turn. Which often makes conversation kind of stilted. You'll see.
The plan was that I'd leave New York, fly to L.A., change my clothes, and go ice-skating with Myers somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. I'd heard that Myers, a rabid hockey fanatic, would rather walk on ice than water.
But when I get to L.A., Myers tells me he is suffering from a cold, that he can't quite figure out when he could possibly find the time to go skating, and asks whether I'd mind coming to an office on Wilshire to talk. Hey, he's the star, so off I go.
When I arrive in front of the building, I see Myers walking down the street towards me. That I recognize him at all makes me pretty damned pleased with myself, because his face sometimes gets lost amongst all his characters. He's in black jeans, a black T-shirt and sneakers. He's tapping on his legs like the kid who sat behind you all through grade school. When we stand next to each other, I can look down into his scalp. We find an unoccupied office and get comfortable.
"I saw Wayne's World," I tell Myers, in that way I have of breaking the ice right away, "and I just loved the part where you pulled your underwear up your butt."
"It's a living," he says with a smile.
"When I told all my teenage friends that I was interviewing you, they were apoplectic. They think you're God. I bet in the future, books are going to be written about Wayne and Garth, about how they were these world-class nerds who got a cable-access show, became famous, and even got the girl. It's a real phenomenon. You've given dorkiness a certain cachet. I can understand why all those young boys went crazy over you ..."
"I don't," he says, "but thanks. Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know," he says, "you're squinting ..."
"I was just thinking. I asked a lot of people about you these last few weeks, and one of my girlfriends said, 'Oh, Mike Myers--I'm going to marry him.'"
Myers is blushing.
"And I asked if she had ever met you, and she said no, but she said she could tell from seeing you on television that you were the perfect man for her."
"Uh-oh," says Myers, imagining the worst.
"Don't worry, she's not a psychopath. She's just attracted to very talented, successful men. She works at Barneys ..."
"Oh, that might come in handy, because I always want to go in there and buy a suit. I tend to only like--"
"She'd probably give you--" I start to say.
"... I tend to only like vintage clothing," Myers continues. "Because the '50s were scaled down and I'm only 5'8"."
"To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen," I want to say, "I have seen 5'8", sir, and you are not him." But what I say aloud is, "She wants to marry you, so she'd probably give you a great deal."
"She may be disappointed, because I'm getting married."
"Isn't your new film, So I Married an Axe Murderer, about marriage?"
"I just want to say," he remarks, "that I think Fear of Marriage is a much better title."
"Was that the working title?"
"No. That was just the title I prefer. Anyway, I was offered the script, and I said I wouldn't do it unless I could rewrite it, because it had seeds of promise, but it needed more work. What I like about it was that it talked about the rite of passage of marriage. I thought it was interesting because the only other people we know really, really intimately for a long time who are married are our parents, and they're that much closer to death than you are."
Huh?
"Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death," Myers continues. "The rite of passage after marriage is retirement, and then death. So you're two rites of passage away from death. Marriage, retirement, death. I always thought that was an interesting rite of passage, and one that contained a lot of sense of comedy. The only way I could do this movie is if I could totally rewrite it... not just my part, but the whole thing."
"Did you rewrite the--"
Myers hasn't even heard me. "A lot of people don't understand why I want to write. They say, 'You're an actor. You get to be in the movie, so why would you have to write it, too?' I had already written Wayne's World, and I'm one of those terrible hyphenates that has a hard time having his role defined."
"Are you an actor or comedian first?" I get in quick, before the door closes.
"I'm a comedic actor, not to mix words, but it's something I think about. A comedic actor. I like to think that Christopher Guest, Phil Hartman, Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness are comedic actors. And Dan Aykroyd, too. Those are my heroes."
"Okay, where were we?"
"Okay, Axe Murderer," says Myers. "I called Neil Mullarkey, my writing partner from England--"
"When were you in England?"
". . . and I said, 'Come on over, the water's fine,' and we rewrote the whole thing."
(In a later conversation on the telephone, Myers will tell me dejectedly that the Writers Guild didn't agree: they decided that the original writer, Robbie Fox, should retain sole screenwriting credit. "I'm a big supporter of the Guild because I come from a union background," Myers will explain, "but I thought that the rules were ill-employed in this instance. People who know my work will see how much of it is in the film. And we were never seeking sole screenwriting credit. We wanted to say that it was based on Robbie Fox's story. But I feel that Neil Mullarkey got totally ripped off. All the dialogue is me and Neil, and he deserves to get his credit.")
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."
Myers pauses for air, so I jump right in. "Tell me about your 'Saturday Night Live' character Dieter."
"Dieter's this German who's on a TV show called 'Sprockets,' which are those tiny holes on the side of film. It's a German television show, really, it's a parody of German television, although I've never actually seen German television.
"Dieter has a monkey named Klaus, and I'm always urging people to 'Touch my monkey, touch it.' And the monkey has the same suit, but we couldn't find Beatle boots small enough for him. In Europe, you know, they tend to sublimate the culture into an art form, like they'll say, 'Was it Schopenhauer, or was it The Skipper on "Gilligan's Island" who said, "Life is alienation"?' You know what I mean? They'd look at the allegory of 'Gilligan's Island,' and say something like..." He pauses, then shoots me a naughty grin. "No man is a 'Gilligan's Island.'"
"So true," I say. "What about all the stories that say you and Dana Carvey, your Wayne's World and 'Saturday Night Live' co-star, don't get along?"
"It's really amazing," he says, not missing a beat, "but this one guy wrote a piece in Entertainment Weekly and he kept attacking me and Dana, saying we were fighting. I never even talked to the man and neither did Dana! And he assigned all these things that never happened.
"There were stories that Madonna was calling my house, that she was pestering me. And that's so crazy, because Madonna has never called my house, and my associations with her have always been because she's a fan of 'Coffee Talk.' And she did the 'Wayne's World' thing on TV, and all I remember her saying was, 'If you slip me the tongue, I'm going to kill you.' Which was cool. But then I read that Madonna is hounding me.
"Dana and I have never fought. Of course, would you rather think that Siegfried and Roy get along, or that they fight all the time?"
"Come again?"
"You know what I mean. The copy is much better if we hate each other. But it's just not true. I have a brotherly relationship with Dana. We love to hang out, we both love Todd Rundgren and The Beatles. Both our brothers are musicians, and Dana and I just like to noodle around. We speak three or four times a week, he has a family, I love the guy. I think he's a great comedian, and it's an honor to work with him."
"Okay," I say, sorry I ever brought the topic up. "Speaking of Madonna and your tongue, what were some of the other things that you thought were cool when you were a kid?"
"Well, I used to think Flip Wilson was cool."
"Funny you should say that," I tell him. "I wasn't feeling well a few months ago, and I went down to Venice to buy some herbs, and Flip Wilson walked in the store. And almost immediately, I felt better."
For the first time all day, Myers really looks at me. Hard. "That's interesting," he says, his gaze narrowing. "Because I really haven't thought about Flip Wilson in years, and he just popped into my head."
I don't know what to say.
"I'm a low-grade psychic," Myers tells me.
"God, I hope it's not catching ..."
Myers does not crack a smile. "I have to say that this is weird, that I would say 'Flip Wilson,' because I haven't uttered his name in at least two years. And that it would be of significance to you--that it would resonate with you--is very interesting. Sometimes I will go into a meditative state, there's a really tremendous, tremendous meditation where you're led through a field, and you breathe in different colors, and you end up at this gazebo, and everyone you want can be there." I am speechless. Myers does not notice.
"So, obviously, I wanted to meet my dad, who died recently. I wanted to talk to him for a minute. And I talked to him, and I said, 'Who did you bring from the spirit world?' And he brought Peter Sellers, so I had a good chat with Peter. I have a whole recollection of the conversation. And then he told me some things to do. And my dad did, too. And I said, 'Is this cool or what? Isn't this neat?'"
It's not the word that comes to mind, actually.
"And then the next part of the meditation is, you need to find a sign to reaffirm the good thoughts that we've talked about, you need a tangible sign that will occur at the moments when you've lost faith. So, about five months later I'm really stressed out from 'Saturday Night Live,' it's very taxing. Gilda Radner said that that's what gave her cancer... "
"She did?" I ask, but if Myers hears me, he gives no sign of it.
"Anyway, I was going to England for the premiere of the movie and to spread my father's ashes on the Mersey in Liverpool. I was having a tremendous amount of logistical problems and nightmares, and I was really very vulnerable. Now, I'm extremely superstitious, and on my route into work on 'Saturday Night Live' I go through Rockefeller Center. And there's the flags of the world there. And like a lunatic, I knock three times on the Canadian flagpole every time I go by. I always have. I was particularly stressed out, so I... Why are you laughing?"
"I don't know," I admit. "I just love this story already."
"Okay, and it was sort of like, you know, you walk, you pretend you're just looking at it, you tap on it so no one will notice, and you walk on. So I did this for like three weeks intensely, and it was a very stressful time. In the meditation, what I was told to look for was a white horse. Are you with me so far?"
Well, no, but I only get in, "Just tell me again what--" before he's off again.
"So, we have the last show of the season on 'Saturday Night Live,' and there's a huge party that takes place at the American Festival Cafe, which is where the skating rink is at Rockefeller Center. Of course there's no skating at that point, because it's spring. It's an outdoor cafe. And it's under the stars, right?
"So, you have the picture: I am super stressed out, it's the last show and I have to take stuff to my office, you always have stuff, and I also had presents for everybody. And it's hard to find people at the party, you're constantly looking for people to give them their presents, and I'm tired, and the next day I'm flying to England with my father's ashes. And my father's ashes, for two weeks, have been in this hotel room in New York, because I'm between apartments. Which just makes the whole thing weirder. Two weeks before, when I was knocking on the pole, I had noticed a 3×5 card taped to the back of the Canadian pole. It was taped on the top, the two sides, and on the bottom, with electrical tape. And I thought, 'I'd love to see what's written on this 3×5 card,' but I didn't dare open it..."
"Didn't you think that maybe--"
"And like I said, I've had the meditation, it's the end of the show, and we're under the stars at Rockefeller Center, all the flags flying, right? As Robin and I are leaving the party, I go, 'C'mon, Robin, I just have to knock on the pole one last time.' This is on the way to the car to go home. And I went over to the thing, .and I see the card is still there. It's been there for two or three weeks already. I go, 'Robin, look, you're gonna think I'm a lunatic,' and I tell her the whole thing, about knocking on the pole, and the card, and she says, 'You have to look, you have to.' So I take it off and I open it up, and it says, Under the stars, they danced on Saturday night, a white horse was their guide. I swear to God. Isn't that weird?"
"What did you do with it?"
"With what?" he asks, looking at me as if I've missed the whole point of his story.
"The card..."
"I dropped it. I mean, I almost died. Wouldn't you?"
There's only time for one more question before I go, so I ask Myers what his father did for a living when he arrived in Canada from England. Guess what! He sold encyclopedias. Which makes everything crystal clear, right?
Clap. Loudly.
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Martha Frankel wrote about tearjerkers for the June Movieline.