Do we like Mike Myers?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean harm record and a decent public one, but the record is thin on good works and a few old stoushes stop it going higher.
Michael Myers was born in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, to parents who had emigrated from England, and he was in TV commercials by the age of eight. His dad's love of the Pink Panther films is credited as an influence on Austin Powers. After school he joined Toronto's Second City and then did stints in London and Chicago.
The big break came in 1989 when Lorne Michaels invited him onto Saturday Night Live, where he stayed until 1995 and created Wayne Campbell. That grew into Wayne's World in 1992, then the Austin Powers films from 1997, and he voiced the Shrek series on top. He also wrote and played music with his band Ming Tea, which is a very Myers thing to do.
The harm check is a short one, and we'll say so plainly: searches on LGBTQ+ people, women, vaccines, climate and race turned up nothing from him. No slide into conspiracy theories, no culture-war grifting, and no run of films with the usual suspects. The one criticism that follows him is that some critics panned The Love Guru in 2008, and that's a comedy-quality argument, not a harm one.
The political moment people remember is March 2025, when he wore a “Canada is Not for Sale” shirt on SNL and mouthed “elbows up” to the camera. Elon Musk had said Canada was “not a real country”. Myers told the New York Times it was not about him but about his country, and that he wanted Canadians to know he was with them. Where you land on it depends on whether you read it as a patriotic protest or as a celebrity weighing in, but it was aimed at threats to his home country, not at any group of people.
On the good-person side the record is clean in what we could open. In 2023 a Canadian radio host alleged Myers had him removed from the Love Guru set for making eye contact, and a rep for Myers said he knew nothing about it. Add the old Dieter fight with a studio, which was settled in 2000, and that's honestly the whole list of stoushes.
The good stuff is mostly a career spent making people laugh, plus a lot of love for home. He has a Hollywood star (2002) and a spot in Canada's Walk of Fame (2003). At the 2026 Canadian Screen Awards he accepted a special honour and thanked Scarborough, through tears, saying “I'd literally be nothing without you”. We couldn't verify specific charity work from reputable sources, so we won't invent any.