‘What Gomez Addams is to romance, Austin Powers is to sex’: Cinema’s horniest secret agent is much more of a gentleman than his reputation suggests

In a world littered with legacy sequels, many of which nobody asked for, it’s borderline criminal that the world has yet to receive a fourth Austin Powers movie.

That being said, Mike Myers has hardly been a prolific presence on our screens in the last decade and a half, and even when he did return from his self-imposed exiled to get back to doing what he does best – namely, playing a myriad of characters in a comedy – the end result was one of Netflix’s biggest-ever bombs.

And yet, rumors of Austin Powers 4 have never disappeared completely over the last 20 years, but it might come as a surprise for anyone who hasn’t watched the trilogy in a while to discover that the notoriously randy operative isn’t quite the sex-crazed maniac his reputation suggests.

In fact, as pointed out by an illuminating Reddit thread, Austin was always respectful of other people’s boundaries and the idea of consent, despite being driven almost entirely by his libido. One comment sums up his personality to a tee, though, saying that “what Gomez Addams is to romance, Austin Powers is to sex.” Quite frankly, there’s no better way of putting it.

He may have been frozen in time in the 1960s and emerged 30 years later to pick up where he left off by either shagging now or shagging later depending on who he was dealing with, but he was a very modern man when it came to the notions of embracing the modern culture of sex, despite the overriding fact he was always determine to have it off at the end of the day one way or another.

He may have asked if that made you horny, baby, but if it didn’t then he wouldn’t press the issue.