Mike Myers and The Cat in the Hat: the Story Behind the Strangest Role of His Career

Did Mike Myers really play the Cat in the Hat?

Yes, and that is usually the first thing people want confirmed. In November 2003, Mike Myers, already famous as Wayne Campbell, as Austin Powers and as the voice of Shrek, climbed into a full body cat suit and a prosthetic face to play the title role in a live action version of Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat. Everything on screen is him: the fur, the whiskers, the tall striped hat, the voice pitched somewhere between a lounge singer and a used car salesman. It remains one of the strangest and most argued about performances in modern family cinema, and it sits in the same tricky category as every attempt to turn a storybook character into flesh and blood, the kind of project that keeps producing live action versions of animated classics and the debates that always follow them.

The film was directed by Bo Welch, a celebrated production designer stepping behind the camera for the first time, and released by Universal with DreamWorks and Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment attached. Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin played Sally and Conrad, the two children left alone on a rainy afternoon. Alec Baldwin played the odious neighbour, Sean Hayes doubled as a fussy boss and the family dog, and Amy Hill was the babysitter who sleeps through the chaos. On paper, it looked like a machine built to print money.

Who is Mike Myers, and where is he from?

Michael John Myers was born on 25 May 1963 in Scarborough, on the eastern edge of Toronto, which makes him 63 today. His parents had emigrated from Liverpool, and that English household inside a Canadian suburb explains a great deal about his comedy: the Beatles records, the British sitcoms, the music hall timing that keeps surfacing in his work. He was appearing in commercials as a child, joined the Toronto branch of the Second City improv theatre as a teenager, and later moved to its Chicago stage, which for decades has been the closest thing North American comedy has to a conservatoire.

Saturday Night Live hired him in 1989 and he stayed until 1995, inventing Wayne Campbell, Dieter, Linda Richman and a long string of others. Wayne's World became a film in 1992 and turned a basement cable show into a global catchphrase machine, complete with a headbanging car scene that sent a whole generation back to the guitar heroes their parents grew up on. He followed it with So I Married an Axe Murderer, leaning hard into the Scottish side of his comic vocabulary, a habit that later produced Fat Bastard and, more famously, an ogre who sounds like he wandered out of Glasgow. If you have ever wondered why so much of his humour rests on the rhythm of Scottish turns of phrase, that is the thread running through it.

By the end of the nineties he was one of the biggest comedy stars alive. Austin Powers arrived in 1997 and its sequels became events, the sort of releases that owned a summer the way a headline slot at the festival that defined nineties youth culture once did. Then came Shrek in 2001. And then, in 2003, the Cat.

How the 2003 film actually got made

The short version is that the Grinch worked. Ron Howard's live action How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with Jim Carrey buried in green fur, had been an enormous hit in 2000, and Hollywood does not leave a formula alone. The Cat in the Hat was the obvious follow up: the second most recognisable Seuss character in the world, and Myers was the comedian most likely to survive under that much latex.

It was also widely reported at the time that Myers took the part in connection with a settlement with Universal over an abandoned film based on his Sprockets sketch. Whether or not that shaped the performance, it helps explain how an actor at the very top of his powers ended up in a project that never quite felt like his own.

The suit, the makeup and the very long days

The physical build was the real story. The Cat was a full body costume topped with an animatronic prosthetic face, and Myers reportedly spent hours in the makeup chair before every shooting day, then more hours getting out of it again. That is craft work of a kind that has largely gone out of fashion, far closer to the handmade puppetry and creature building celebrated in the strangest stop motion features than to anything a computer generates today. Whatever you think of the film, nobody phoned in the suit.

Dakota Fanning was around nine when she shot it and already one of the most in demand young performers in America, a career arc that still shapes how studios cast children, right down to the teenage leads carrying big franchise roles today.

Why did The Cat in the Hat never get a sequel?

This is the question search engines rarely answer cleanly, and it has a real answer. The reviews were brutal, the film collected Razzie nominations, and the hostility was unusual even by the standards of a bad children's picture. But the decisive factor was not the press. Audrey Geisel, the widow of Theodor Seuss Geisel and the guardian of his estate, was unhappy with the result and refused to license any further live action adaptations of her husband's books. That decision held. Every major Seuss film since has been animated: Horton Hears a Who!, The Lorax, The Grinch. One family's veto redirected an entire franchise.

It is worth remembering what the internet looked like in 2003. The pile on happened in newspaper columns and early blogs rather than across a hundred thousand posts, in the era when a single gossip blogger could set the tone for a week. Released today, the reaction would have been faster, louder and probably shorter lived.

Why Mike Myers and the Cat in the Hat are trending now

Two things are pulling the search back up. The first is that the Cat has returned in animated form, with Bill Hader voicing the character in a new Warner Bros. version. Every time a beloved property is revived, audiences reach backwards for the previous attempt, exactly the way a new trailer for a rebooted eighties title sends people hunting down the original. Curiosity about the new Cat becomes curiosity about the old one.

The second is the way old footage circulates now. Clips from 2003 get cut, captioned, slowed down and set to music by people who were not born when the film came out, and the tools have become trivially easy to use, from software that strips a voice out of a soundtrack to video generators that restyle a scene in seconds. A film can be reappraised twenty years late simply because a fifteen second fragment travels well. Here at fotobreak we see the pattern constantly: the spike is rarely about news, it is about a clip.

There is a genuine reappraisal in there too. A generation that watched the film on DVD as small children, without reading a single review, remembers it fondly. That gap between the critical record and the childhood memory is fertile ground for arguments, and arguments are what keep a search term alive.

The people around him

Myers has always worked in tight creative partnerships. Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and Antonio Banderas built the Shrek world with him. Dana Carvey was his other half in Wayne's World. Bo Welch, the Cat in the Hat director, came out of the visual world of Tim Burton and Barry Sonnenfeld, which is why the film looks like a pop up book even in the moments when it is not working, a reminder of how completely one director's obsession can stamp a family film, in much the way a horror specialist stamps a streaming series with a single recognisable voice.

Off screen he is married and a father of three, and he has kept his private life almost entirely out of the press, which is its own kind of achievement for someone this famous. He is a loud, unembarrassed Canadian patriot, a Toronto Maple Leafs supporter, and the author of a book about his home country. He directed a documentary about the talent manager Shep Gordon, and he has spent his sixties doing what a lot of veteran performers do, taking odd, character driven jobs rather than chasing another blockbuster, the same late career widening you see when a crooner from another era records a rock album.

What is Mike Myers doing now?

Recent years have brought a Netflix series in which he played most of the cast himself, supporting roles in ensemble films, and a much noticed return to Saturday Night Live as a guest performer and impressionist. A fifth Shrek film has been in development with the original voice cast attached, which would put him back in the role most children know him for. Streaming has given the Cat a quiet second life as well, on the same services that keep audiences hunting for explainers and ending breakdowns after the credits roll.

He is not a heavy social media user, which frustrates people who go looking for him, so the reliable way to follow his work is through the studios releasing it rather than through a daily feed. On money, he has never discussed his fees publicly and there is no point guessing: his earnings from Shrek and Austin Powers are simply not disclosed, unlike the estates and residual arrangements of older stars that occasionally get picked over in the net worth write ups of classic era performers.

What happens next

The Cat in the Hat has become, oddly, a piece of film history rather than a flop to be forgotten: the picture that ended live action Seuss, and a case study in what happens when a studio, an estate and a comedian each want a different film. If you have children, the practical takeaway is simple. The book is still perfect, the 1971 animated special is short and charming, and the 2003 film is a strange, loud, occasionally very funny curiosity best watched with low expectations and a lot of snacks. It is a rainy afternoon choice that sits comfortably alongside the book world quizzes children love and an indoor play centre when the weather refuses to cooperate.

Myers himself has rarely revisited the role in interviews. At 63 he seems comfortable being the man who made four or five things people quote back to him forever, and one thing they argue about instead. For more profiles of the names suddenly filling search boxes, our rolling news desk keeps track.