First look: Comedy guru Mike Myers loves his characters
LOS ANGELES ó Mike Myers doesn’t seem like a slowpoke. He tends to talk fast, play multiple characters in his movies and rattle off jokes like Robin Williams on Red Bull.
But the secret behind his comedy, he says, is patience.
It has taken Myers four years to do his first live-action movie since 2003’s The Cat in the Hat and a decade to create an original comic character (his last being 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery).
He finally returns with The Love Guru, which hits screens June 20. The film, which also stars Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake and Ben Kingsley, features Myers as Pitka, an American left as a child at the gates of an ashram in India. Pitka becomes a self-help guru who tries to smooth the marital rift of a hockey star and his wife.
Myers, a native of Ontario, says he wrote the film because of his interests in Eastern philosophy and hockey. But he isn’t the type to zip out a script the moment an idea hits.
“I enjoy having the Lamaze birthing process of it,” says Myers, who also authored the Wayne’s World and Austin Powers franchises. “It usually takes me three, 3Ω years in between characters.”
Why so long? He’s very protective of his original live-action characters. “I’ve written and created everything I’ve done, and it takes me a year to reflect on what I’ve done, a year to let the idea incubate and a year to create” a new character.
For Pitka, that included playing a philosopher of Eastern religion in New York and Los Angeles, where some unsuspecting passersby sought advice from Myers, who never broke from character.
“They asked some very spiritual and deep questions,” he says. “It’s been fascinating combining comedy with a nice life-affirming message.”
Fascinating, if challenging. He knows combining comedy, hockey and Eastern principles is a little “like figuring out how they got the peanut butter in the chocolate and the chocolate in the peanut butter.”
But he didn’t expect the Wayne’s World or Austin Powers films to be successes, either.
“When I did Wayne’s World, I thought you had to grow up in my neighborhood to get it,” he says. “When I did Austin, I thought you had to grow up in my house to get it, because my parents are from Liverpool. But I’ve been very lucky to create things people have liked, so I have to stay true to the things that interest me.”
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