The massive Shrek gamble that saved the animated classic

It seems crazy to imagine a time when Shrek wasn't a household name. Unless you'd happened to pick up William Steig's picture book in the 1990s, Shrek would've been completely new to you when DreamWorks sent him crashing into cinemas in the summer of 2001.

It went on to earn $492m (￡379m) at the global box office and snared the first ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature from right under the nose of Pixar's equally brilliant Monsters, Inc. There's no disputing its classic status, whether it's in the billions of box office dollars, the merchandising, or all of those internet memes.

More than 20 years on, DreamWorks is hard at work on Shrek 5, reuniting the three main cast members — Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, and Eddie Murphy. There's also a spin-off in the works for Murphy's fast-talking sidekick Donkey.

But none of this would have happened without one big, last-minute gamble. That gamble cost $4m (￡3.1m) and it involved Myers' accent.

Mike Myers wasn't always going to be the one to provide the voice of Shrek. The Austin Powers actor only came in to save the day at the eleventh hour. Nicolas Cage had been sounded out, but turned it down because he didn't want to look like an ogre. Interestingly, he would later voice the decidedly ogre-like patriarch of caveman family The Croods.

Read more: Shrek: How the Scottish ogre was originally meant to sound completely different (The Independent)

It was Saturday Night Live legend Chris Farley who eventually got the gig and he even did the lion's share of the voice work. But tragedy struck in 1997 when Farley died at the age of just 33 as a result of a drug overdose. It is believed he only had five days of work left to do on Shrek.

Myers, riding high on the back of Austin Powers, was subsequently drafted in. Huge changes were made to the script — reportedly, Myers didn't want to be seen as replacing Farley — and new recording sessions started for what would become Shrek.

The star tried a number of different voices, including a thick Canadian accent and a voice similar to his Lothar of the Hill People sketches on Saturday Night Live. He saw a rough cut of the film in 2000 and suggested a big change: he wanted to do it all again with a Scottish accent.

Read more: Was This Man The Inspiration For Shrek? (Yahoo Entertainment)

Myers had used this sort of accent before, having grown up with Scottish relatives. He'd also used it for the role of Fat Bastard — some comedy of this era has aged horribly — in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Obviously, with so much of the film already done, this required some money to be spent.

In a report from May 2001, The Guardian wrote that producer Jeffrey Katzenberg said: "[The accent] was so good we took $4m worth of animation out and did it again."

For what it's worth, Myers has disputed the cost of all this. In a 2022 interview with Vanity Fair, he said: "They spent some money, but not the amount of money that has been reported in the press, I'd like to point out. And, by the way, I recorded it all for free one more time and [I was] just happy to do so because I wanted it to be good."

Read more: Mike Myers has said 'maybe' to a fourth Austin Powers film (BANG Showbiz)

The money was definitely well-spent once the reviews and the box office dollars came rolling in. One particularly impressed exec was DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg, who wrote Myers a note thanking him for suggesting the accent.

It's now impossible to imagine Shrek ever speaking with anything other than a Scottish accent. Myers' performance was one of the driving forces that carried Shrek to its blockbuster success. There's just something delightfully counter-intuitive about a mythical ogre sounding like a Glaswegian dock worker.

We'll all get to hear that famous accent again when Shrek 5 makes its way to our screens. But it's worth remembering that the filmmakers were willing to put their money where Myers' mouth was in order to make Shrek as good as it could be.

Shrek 5 will be released on 1 July 2026.