The making of the third Austin Powers movie was an emotional experience for its star, Mike Myers. On the day, in November 2001, when Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and Gwyneth Paltrow arrived on set to shoot the fake “film within a film” cameos with which the action opens, he received a letter from George Harrison – in which the Beatle professed his admiration for Myers and his James Bond-parodying alter-ego. (Telegraph)
Later that same day, Harrison died (having been diagnosed with cancer several months earlier). Myers found himself sobbing in a corner. “I cried like a baby,” he would remember. Yet those tears turned to smiles further into the filming of Austin Powers in Goldmember when his new co-star arrived – a 19-year-old from suburban Texas whose only previous acting experience had been in a hip-hop retelling of the opera Carmen made by MTV.
Her name was Beyoncé Knowles, and she would soon become one of the biggest icons in pop – a role she still occupies, on the release of her much-anticipated latest album, Cowboy Carter.
She is also one of the entertainment industry’s most powerful feminist voices. In 2013, she described herself as a “modern-day feminist,” and for years, she toured with an all-female band. Feminism has also been a driving force in her music: her 2016 LP Lemonade was a dense song cycle that scrutinised the complexities of marriage, infidelity, and race in modern America.
It is fair to say that these issues were not on the agenda when she slipped into a skimpy gold suit and donned a retro wig for 2002’s Goldmember. The teenage Beyoncé was playing Austin Powers’s old love interest, Foxxy Cleopatra – a Pam Grier-style action heroine inspired by the blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s. Not only did she have to pretend to have once fancied the absurd Powers – who had loved her and left her before the story begins – but she had to do so in a film crammed with knob gags and fart jokes.
Amidst this tidal wave of fnar fnar humour, a lesser performer might have been all at sea. Not Beyoncé. In only her second screen role, she radiated confidence. She was also multi-tasking: in between filming she was on tour with her band Destiny’s Child, and recording their swan song album they would release in 2004.
What was she doing in Austin Powers in the first place? Myers and his director, Jay Roach, were looking for a strong female lead to play off Myers as Elizabeth Hurley and Heather Graham had in the previous Powers (a career high for Hurley, it would turn out).
“She was already a known person at the time, and we just wanted to go crazier with everything we did in that third film,” Roach told Vulture in a 2022 oral history of Beyoncé’s participation in Goldmember.
“This movie was really hard to put together. Much like every casting decision in Austin, it all seemed impossible. We’re going to get Steven Spielberg to pretend like he’s directing Austin? We’re going to get Tom Cruise to play Austin and we’re going to get Gwyneth Paltrow to play Dixie Normous?” (They managed all these things.)
The producers had decided Powers’s new foil should be a young black actress. Beyoncé’s name was suggested. “We sat down with Beyoncé and her mom on the rooftop patio outside of Mike Myers’s room at the Chateau Marmont and talked about the possibilities for the character,” Roach said. “Her mom was very much into blaxploitation movies. She could tell that was the DNA for Foxxy. Her mom was so cool and so helpful and instantly had ideas for us.”
