Before Mike Myers was Shrek, it was Chris Farley

The original voice of Shrek was Myers’ fellow SNL castmate Chris Farley, whose untimely death in 1997 led DreamWorks Animation to recast the role. And while the version of Shrek we got is undeniably a triumph, one wonders what could have been. So ahead of the movie’s 25th anniversary, Polygon reached out to one of the people who knew Farley best, his older brother Tom Farley, who also authored the beautiful, heart-wrenching biography The Chris Farley Show.

Tom Farley didn’t hear too much about Shrek while his brother was alive. “He was saying, ‘I’m doing this movie about an ogre.’ I don’t know if he mentioned that it was animated or not,” recalls Farley.

It wasn’t until well after his brother passed that he thought about it again.

“Chris passed away and it was like, four years later. I was taking my kids to a movie out in Fairfield, Connecticut where we lived and I saw one of those cardboard cutouts of Shrek and I’m like, ‘Was that Chris’s movie?’ Then I called up my brothers, Johnny and Kevin, and they said it was,” says Farley.

That’s also when Tom Farley learned something else about the film: the Chris Farley version almost got released even after his death.

“Kevin said, ‘They approached me to finish it because Chris had done maybe 90% of the voiceovers.’ But Kevin said, ‘That seemed really creepy to me, so I declined,’” recalls Tom Farley. “He thought it would be weird to do Chris’s movie. Also, it was really soon. It was like, too soon to be asking Kevin that.”

Despite Chris Farley nearly completing his work on the film, his version would eventually be scrapped. Little pieces of it did later leak online, including a rough animatic and a more fully animated screen test. Altogether, what’s been made public about Chris Farley’s take on Shrek only amounts to a few minutes, nowhere near the 90 percent of the film that was recorded.

Despite the limited nature of the leaks, it’s clear that Chris Farley’s Shrek was a good deal different from what Mike Myers would do with the role. Aside from not being Scottish, Farley’s performance also seems a bit more grounded and sensitive than what Myers delivered.

“It was a different Shrek. It was very Chris-like,” says Tom Farley. “Chris did loud and angry, but he had this heart underneath. That’s what Chris really wanted to show, like those moments in Tommy Boy when he’s on the sailboat talking to his dad — he wanted to show more of that. There was so much of that in Chris that he never got to show people. I think he could have done it with Shrek. I think that’s what his Shrek would have been.”

So while Shrek would have been a very different film with Farley, the reverse may also have been true: Shrek could have made a big difference in Farley’s career and legacy.

Image: Paramount

For Tom Farley, the biggest difference between his brother’s version of Shrek and the one we ultimately got comes down to the fact that Chris Farley’s characters all bore a pretty close resemblance to Chris Farley himself.

“It’s funny, every character Chris did was really Chris,” he says. “Whereas someone like Dana Carvey, he’s the Church Lady or Hans and Franz or whatever, but Chris was the opposite. He was like, I’m going to start with Chris and add elements to define this character, but it’d still be me at the core — you’re still seeing me. I think that’s why we love him and remember him all these years later, because he didn’t hide behind a character. He was the character. Even if you animate it and make it an ogre, it’s Chris.”