I Am Chris Farley opens in theaters this weekend before debuting on Spike Aug. He begins the series as an unsociable hermit until he meets his soon-to-be best friend, Donkey. He prides himself on being a big, green, terrifying ogre and is grumpy and hot-tempered, but is also caring and brave. It was a bad time, bad timing… a tragedy. Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers, Michael Gough as his official voice in the video games) is the lead character in all of the films. “The studio needed to do what they needed to do. And it’s clear he doesn’t harbor any ill feelings for the DreamWorks’ decision to recast the role. Kevin said he’s never gotten to hear the audio Chris taped for Shrek, which hasn’t released publicly. “They probably wanted to make Shrek 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, so…” (So far they’ve made four of those, and a fifth one is likely, according to DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.) “I understand why ,” Kevin said when asked it if was disappointing for the Farley family when they couldn’t salvage Chris’s original recordings.

The role, of course, ultimately went to Chris’s SNL co-star Mike Myers, who, among other touches, gave Shrek a distinctive Scottish brogue. “Originally the Shrek character was a little bit more like Chris, like a humble, bumbling innocent guy,” said Kevin Farley, who appears in and executive-produced the new documentary about the life and career of his brother, I Am Chris Farley.

The late Saturday Night Live alum’s version of Shrek would have been markedly different from the one we all know.

But he technically had one more movie in the can at the time of his death, and it would become one of the biggest animated movies of all time.įarley was originally cast as the titular green ogre in the 2001 blockbuster Shrek, and, according to his brother, Kevin Farley, Chris had recorded nearly all of his character’s dialogue before he died of a drug overdose in 1997. Not counting an unbilled cameo in the Norm Macdonald vehicle Dirty Work, Chris Farley’s last movie credit is the Western comedy Almost Heroes (1998) with Matthew Perry.

Shrek voice actor