Wayne’s World has remained an iconic comedy movie ever since its debut, to the point that the characters were brought out of retirement for a Super Bowl ad just a couple of years ago. Though the film is well regarded by fans, its opening scene with the Bohemian Rhapsody singalong perhaps remains its most famous sequence. Speaking in a retrospective interview with Vanity Fair where he broke down scene from his career, Wayne’s World star and creator Mike Myers opened up about filming this sequence, the fights that it took to get the Queen song included, and how his neck still hurts three decades later.
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“What I remember most about this was fighting very, very hard for it to be Bohemian Rhapsody,” Myers said “And (the studio) didn’t wanna do it. They wanted to do Guns N’ Roses, which I love Guns N’ Roses, but I didn’t have anything funny for it. And then Lorne was like, ‘You really want it?’ I went, ‘Yeah.’ So Lorne fought for it on my behalf, Lorne Michaels, and Dana and I talked about five days ago about our necks still hurt from (the scene). That was easily 200 takes over two nights in, oh, some town. I wanna say El Segundo or Cerritos outside of Los Angeles, but I just couldn’t believe I was in a movie.”
Myers added an anecdote about the scene and the film, adding: “What was so much fun about this scene was the director, Penelope Spheeris, who I fought very hard to be the director, even though she didn’t have any comedy credits, she had done “The Decline of the Western Civilization,” a documentary about heavy metal that was so incredibly awesome and authentic. I knew that she would get the heavy metal part of it, and she knocked it outta the park.”
To her credit, in a previous interview with our sister site told PopCulture.com. Spheeris also opened up about the Guns N’ Roses/Queen song argument revealing: “There are urban legends running around about how certain people might have wanted a Guns N’ Roses song. Well, that wasn’t me. I did not want a Guns N’ Roses song instead of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ — the Queen song — because Guns N’ Roses just refused to be in a movie I had done right before Wayne’s World. So, I was mad at them. I’m over it now….The fact of the matter is when I got the original version of the script, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was written into that version so that was the song from the start. People like to say, ‘Oh, you argued over which song.’ We didn’t. That was the song. The thing about it that I think is weird is that Wayne and Garth thing about themselves as headbangers.”
