Featured Image Credit: Dreamworks
Topics: Celebrity, TV and Film, Drugs
Katherine Sidnell
Mike Myers might be known for his iconic role in Shrek, but did you know that the titular ogre was nearly played by someone else?
Originally, comic Chris Farley was meant to voice the creature feature but tragically died before he was able to complete the film.
Not only could we have had a different lead actor, but the ogre would have had a very different temperament.
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It’s unclear how the video came to be leaked online, but the short clip was posted on Twitter and has original audio recorded by the late actor.
The scene even features Eddie Murphy’s Donkey and storyboard images, giving fans a glimpse of what the finished film could have been like.
As you can tell, the Saturday Night Live star had a very different vision of the grumpy green ogre.
In fact, Chris Farley’s brother even spoke about this whilst promoting a documentary about the late actor.
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“Originally the Shrek character was a little bit more like Chris, like a humble, bumbling innocent guy,” Kevin Farley told Yahoo, as he discussed the footage of his late brother in Shrek.
According to Collider, the actor had even recorded 85 per cent of the film’s audio, but sadly he wouldn’t live to see the film released.
Instead, Farley would suddenly pass away in 1997, aged just 33, after overdosing on cocaine and morphine in his Chicago apartment.
Years later, the role would be recast and given to Mike Myers, who adapted the script to make the character more bad-tempered and added his iconic Scottish brogue.
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Speaking about the recasting years later, Kevin Farley said he ‘understood’ why he didn’t use his brother’s original recordings.
“I understand why [they replaced him]…They probably wanted to make Shrek 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, so,” he explained to Yahoo, when asked whether the family were disappointed by the decision.
However, the late actor’s brother wasn’t bitter toward Myers and revealed that he was hugely impressed with his performance.
“The studio needed to do what they needed to do. It was a bad time, bad timing… a tragedy,” he said, adding: “Mike did a great job with Shrek. He knocked it out of the park.”
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It's even more touching when you learn that Farley and Myers worked together on SNL in the early nineties.
However, fans will always wonder about Farley’s unfinished film, especially as it’s nearly 30 years since the actor’s untimely death.