“This is the worst title I’ve ever heard in my life”: 24 years ago, this famous actor did not immediately understand that he was about to star in one of the biggest films in the history of animation.

In the early 2000s, when computer-generated image animation was still in its infancy and the geniuses at the Pixar studio surprised the whole world with the release of their spectacular Toy Story, their rivals from Dreamworks were preparing for a counterattack. Their best card.

An animated twist on Disney-style fairy tales with a talking donkey as the protagonists and above all… a huge green ogre! No one could doubt it at the time, but Shrek would become one of the most profitable sagas in the history of animation and a true flagship of Dreamworks studios.

An unexpected meeting

In France, we are used to hearing the voice of Alain Chabat when we enter the kingdom of Fort Lauderdale, but it is the actor Mike Myers (especially known for the Austin Powers trilogy) who voices him in the original version of the film. .

As he revealed recently on VultureMyers was also offered the role of Shrek in a very specific and surprising way to say the least:

“I went to the premiere of Saving Private Ryan and Jeffrey Katzenberg He came to me after the movie in the lobby with his daughters, who started doing the Austin Powers dance. I was coming out of such an intense movie and I was in tears because my parents went through World War II, and I was in shock, and then they were dancing and I was like, “Yeah, it’s great.” “”

“That’s the worst headline I’ve ever heard in my life.”

However, it was at the end of this rather inappropriate meeting that Jeffrey Katzenberg gave Mike Myers one of the most important offers of his entire career. The actor says:

He said, Mike, do you want to make an animated movie? And I said: of course! He told me they were making one and it was called, and I said, “That’s the worst title I’ve ever heard, like after seeing a lot of Molson’s . He asked me to come and see what it was like. I saw the movie and I liked that it made fun of fairy tales. I thought that was really very clever. “

What did you think of the first part of the Shrek saga? Is this your favorite?

(Re)discover all the hidden details of the movie…