Mike Myers: Intentional man of mystery

During the past three years movie audiences have experienced Will Ferrell as a bumbling anchorman, a clueless NASCAR driver, a soccer coach with father issues and an IRS agent who hears things. They've been able to satisfy their Adam Sandler cravings through his star turns as a henpecked chef, an imprisoned NFL quarterback and an architect with a magical TV remote. And Jim Carrey fans have been able to enjoy him variously as an embittered lover who has his memory erased, a laid-off media executive who embarks on a crime spree or a Lemony Snicket character.

But where is Mike Myers?

The last time filmgoers could pay to see the Scarborough-raised comic's multi-million-dollar grin was three long years ago, in The Cat in the Hat – if they were able to get beyond a grotesquerie of whiskers, makeup and feline prosthetics.

Until he abruptly checked out, Myers, 43, was arguably Hollywood's dominant comic force. In terms of ticket sales his three Austin Powers spy spoofs vied with franchises like X-Men and Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings trilogy.

Yet in the years since The Cat in the Hat – a rare misfire – Myers has virtually disappeared, though he was mentioned in the gossip pages when he made public his divorce in December 2005. And Myers, or his voice at least, did turn up once in theatres, when he played the lead role in the 2004 hit Shrek 2. (Audiences will be hearing it again next May in Shrek the Third.)

But in his most notable live-action performance, during NBC's September 2005 telethon for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Myers was merely a bit player. Paired with rapper Kanye West, he cringed as West veered off script to rant about racism and national hypocrisy.

Myers' decision to remove himself from the game for a time – much as he did between the 1993 release of Wayne's World 2 and the 1997 debut of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – smacks of heresy in a film industry that has made a religion of milking its most bankable comedic stars.

Myers declined to be interviewed, but he authorized his talent agent, his friends and collaborators to provide a composite sketch of his time away. All of those interviewed characterized this period, which may run as long as five years, as a bid to recharge his creative batteries as well as a reflection of his perfectionism and high standards.

"Mike is the author of what he does," said Jay Roach, whom Myers selected to direct all of the Austin Powers films. "Like a novelist writing a novel over a few years, he thinks up all the details and all the layers necessary to make things work.''

David O'Connor of the Creative Artists Agency, who represents Myers, seconded that notion. "Mike is a bit of a different animal," O'Connor said. "If you look at the movies he's been in, in terms of starring vehicles, with very few exceptions they are his creations. Because they are his creations they take a greater amount of time and nurturing and gestation."

Myers himself offered a similar explanation when describing his last leave of absence to James Lipton during a 2001 appearance on Inside the Actors Studio. "There's process and there's product," he said. "And when you're too long on product, you forget about your process."

O'Connor said Myers now has three major products in the works: a comedy about a relationship guru; a drama about the demise of Keith Moon, the legendary drummer for the Who; and another comedy about an office worker under siege by robots. None of these projects is likely to reach theatres until 2008.

Michael Shoemaker, a producer at Saturday Night Live, said Myers' penchant for total quality control – originating the characters, writing the script, often producing his starring vehicles – stems from his tenure on that show. "Here you create and produce everything yourself," Shoemaker said.

Even in the title role in Shrek, Myers wasn't satisfied with just lending his voice and insisted on painstaking improvements.

Of the projects he is concentrating on now, the guru seems the most deeply rooted in his imagination. In 2005 the character made his debut on some small theatre stages in Greenwich Village, just as his Austin Powers persona was once honed at Los Angeles nightspots. Unrecognizable in makeup, a white wig and a yogi's long flowing beard, Myers – who called himself Pitka – dispensed wild advice to the audience in a thick Indian accent.

O'Connor said there were two completed drafts of the script, advanced discussions with Paramount Pictures and the possibility of sequels.

With Wayne's World and Austin Powers, and presumably with his guru, Myers has enjoyed enormous artistic control in part because, as at SNL, he had created his own characters.

In agreeing to star as Keith Moon, though, he cannot hope to have as intimate a knowledge of his subject as one of that project's producers, Roger Daltrey, the Who's lead singer.

Mike De Luca, who approved Austin Powers while president of production at New Line Cinema, is producing the third and perhaps most tentative of the current Myers projects. How to Survive a Robot Uprising is an adaptation of an obscure tongue-in-cheek survival guide. However, the project's screenwriters have left to work on another project.

"Mike's always about the timing and the quality of what he's doing," De Luca said. "I don't think he minds a long time span, if the timing and the quality of the project aren't there yet."

For another year, then, at least, audiences will have to make do with Myers' voice as the big green ogre in Shrek the Third, his physical absence made easier by the notion that they've been spared the blighted vintages that might well have been the Myers product of 2004, 2005 or 2006 – and that he's continuing to work, however deliberately, on a splendid '08.