The only actor to be killed in a movie by Michael Myers and Mike Myers

What do Michael Myers, the face of the never-ending Halloween franchise, and Mike Myers, the brains behind Wayne’s World and Austin Powers, have in common? Apart from their similar names, not much, but they have both killed the same actor onscreen.

The almost identical nomenclature did at least lend itself to a solid gag in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, though, where a band of hapless criminals picked up a set of masks that resembled Myers’ shagadelic secret agent at the expense of John Carpenter’s slasher icon, which itself played off the well-known trivia that Michael’s iconic mask was a repainted William Shatner.

When Carpenter’s seminal horror movie was making waves at the box office on its way to becoming the highest-grossing independent film ever made in 1978 and sparking the genre’s boom period, Myers was 15 years old and in the nascent stages of his acting career having made appearances in several commercials that wouldn’t be seen outside of his native Canada.

Ironically, the boiler suit-wearing mass murderer was at his lowest ebb when the Saturday Night Live alum made it big in the 1990s through the films mentioned above that spawned sequels and soundbites that infiltrated the cultural lexicon. Halloween suffered greatly from the law of diminishing returns, with a slew of subpar sequels failing to recapture the magic of Carpenter’s unforgettable original.

Little did he know it then, but Myers – the actor, not the killer – set the stage for history to be made in 1997, and with one of the first Austin Powers film’s most memorable gags. Austin repeatedly urging Michael McDonald’s goon, listed in the credits as ‘Steve Harmon the Evil Henchman’, to get out of the way as a steamroller trundles towards him at a glacial pace was as funny as it was stupid.

The actor and comedian would have to wait almost 25 years before he carved out his own unique piece of silver screen history, an accomplishment that makes him the only person to exist in the middle of a murderous Venn diagram between the 13 Halloween movies and the 29 features Myers has appeared in as an actor.

In David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills, McDonald played Little John, who meets his maker immediately after Scott MacArthur’s Big John when Michael decides he isn’t too keen on the idea of people living in his childhood home and decides the easiest way to solve the problem is by shuffling them off their mortal coil.

The Halloween figurehead has killed over 150 people during his film career, a figure Myers can’t come close to. However, McDonald is the only person they’ve both bumped off in a movie.

Who did he play in the other Austin Powers movies?

Several actors appeared in Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Goldmember apart from Myers, with Michael York, Robert Wagner, and Mindy Sterling the most prominent.

There were others who popped up in all three in smaller capacities, including Ron Howard’s brother, Clint, as Johnson Ritter, but McDonald has the distinction of playing a different character in each. After being squished by a steamroller in the first, he reappeared as a NATO soldier in the second and a member of the royal guard in the third, and he was lucky enough to avoid the ignominy of being killed in the last two.