1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later had quite the journey from script to screen. Before Jamie Lee Curtis was involved, it was initially planned as a direct-to-video sequel to the previous entry in the series, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Curtis also wanted John Carpenter, who directed the original Halloween in 1978, to direct H20, but he didn’t end up signing on. The gig eventually went to Friday the 13th Part 2 director Steve Miner.
Another person the filmmakers were hoping to get for the legacy sequel was Mike Myers, who, of course, shares his name with the main antagonist in the Halloween movies. “When we were doing Halloween H20, we did ask Mike Myers to do a cameo,” Curtis told Entertainment Weekly in 2015. “He said no,” she continued. Apparently, the plan was to have Myers walk past Curtis’s character on the street and have her give him a confused look.
Interestingly, if he’d taken the part, it would’ve made Myers part of another universe that his Wayne’s World co-star Dana Carvey was also a part of. Carvey’s first acting role was in the franchise’s original sequel, Halloween II, back in 1981. He appears briefly as a news reporter in two scenes, but doesn’t have any lines. You can spot him outside of the house where the murders from the first film happened, and again at the end as Curtis is wheeled out of the hospital.
Myers later talked about what it was like having the same name as a famous serial killer coming up. In an interview with Chris Van Vliet from 2022, Myers said that when he cashed his first check from Saturday Night Live back in the day, the cashier looked at his name and asked, “You’re not gonna kill me, are you?” Myers went on to say, “So I finally am on a TV show, and the name of a mass murderer, fictional though he might be, has already happened. But, uh, surprisingly, people don’t remember the Michael part as much. They tend to remember the Mike part.”
Even though Myers turned down a cameo in Halloween H20, they still attempted to include him in the movie in some way. In the unreleased workprint, a scene from Myers’s 1993 film So I Married an Axe Murderer can be seen playing on TV at one point:
In the final version of H20, they used a scene from Scream 2, which makes absolutely no sense because the original Halloween is shown on TV in the original Scream, making the Halloween movies fictional in the Scream universe. However, it was likely a last-minute change intended as a nod to H20’s screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, who also wrote the Scream movies.
The post The Famous Horror Movie Mike Myers Said No To appeared first on VICE.
