Powers Play

Time to dust off your best shagadelic jokes — Mike Myers is back, baby! Absent from the big screen since 2003's The Cat in the Hat, the actor — who brilliantly spoofed his recent awkward telethon moment with rapper Kanye West on the Oct. 1 season premiere of Saturday Night Live — is in talks to play Keith Moon in a new biopic about the Who drummer, and is discussing a fourth Austin Powers film for New Line. ''There is hope!'' says Myers of the latter. ''We're all circling and talking to each other. I miss doing the characters.''

Both projects would mark a welcome return to active Hollywood duty for Myers (who did lend his voice to 2004's Shrek 2). ''I don't like to work a lot,'' he explains, ''and I've had the luxury of being able to take years between projects.'' But though he usually writes and workshops his own movies, he won't be fulfilling those duties on the Moon biopic; the chance to play the famously over-the-top sticksman (dead of an accidental drug overdose in 1978) for no less a producer than the Who's lead singer, Roger Daltrey, was just too great to pass up. Myers remains mum on plot specifics (''With biopics, there's this thing called the 'flashback,' so all [time periods] are possible''), but he does confirm that everyone involved is ''jazzed, charged, and chugging forward. Both [Roger and I] had working-class English parents, are huge Peter Sellers fans, and love English chocolate. On top of that, I'm a drummer—and that's the important thing.''