Forty-Nine Is Too Young

Dr. Evil’s miniature clone never speaks. He just exists in the frame—same suit, same haircut as his creator, one-eighth the scale—while Mike Myers mugs around him. Verne Troyer made the bit more than its concept, which is the harder thing. The joke was the premise and then Troyer turned it into something genuinely, weirdly charismatic across three films that had no right to be as entertaining as they were.

He died on April 21, 2018, at 49. He’d been hospitalized for alcohol-related illness just weeks before, and his struggles with depression and drinking had been public for years. Born in Sturgis, Michigan, in 1969, he was 81 centimeters tall due to a condition called cartilage-hair hypoplasia. Beyond the Austin Powers trilogy, his filmography covers an interesting range: Griphook in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, roles in Men in Black, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The kind of career that happens when someone is both genuinely distinctive and genuinely willing to work.

Mike Myers paid tribute: Verne was the consummate professional and a beacon of positivity for those of us who had the honor of working with him. It reads a little like a prepared statement, but people who worked with Troyer consistently said the same thing—that he had a presence independent of his height, that he could hold a room, fill the space. Whatever that quality is, it doesn’t come from the industry.

Forty-nine is too young. The circumstances are sad in the particular way addiction makes things sad: preventable in theory, inevitable in practice, always leaving people standing around afterward wondering what they missed.