Actor and comedian Lisa Gilroy has breathed new life into the Austin Powers franchise with her dramatic reading of one of its most, ah, emotional scenes. 

Despite how endlessly quotable the series still remains, Gilroy claims she was able to perform the monologue for her acting class without anyone catching on.

The monologue in question comes from a scene in the first film in which Dr.Evil attends a group therapy session. There, he opens up about his childhood and complicated relationship with his father.

Naturally, this scene is played entirely for laughs in the original, so Gilroy chose to give it a decidedly melancholy twist.

In a video uploaded to Twitter, Gilroy stares wistfully at the camera as she recites lines about Dr.Evil’s father, who would “womanise,” “drink,” “make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark,” and “accuse chestnuts of being lazy.”

Continuing with the spiel, she describes her childhood as having been filled with making meat helmets, and receiving discipline in the form of being “placed in a burlap sack and beaten with reeds.”

Although the dialogue is rather objectively ridiculous, Gilroy managed to slip into the role of a more subdued Dr.Evil with almost worrying ease.

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Since October 20th, the clip has already amassed over 200,000 likes, proving the scene to be simply timeless.

“My acting teacher told us to perform a dramatic monologue from any movie and I did mine from Austin Powers and no one noticed,” Gilroy captioned the post, and we think it’s safe to assume her choice of film was the wackiest among her classmates.

While the last Austin Powers movie premiered back in 2003, director of all three films Jay Roach expressed interesting in reviving the franchise as recently as this year.

Well, if anything does come to fruition, we know we’ll be crossing our fingers that Gilroy nabs a cameo.

Check out Lisa Gilroy’s dramatic reading from Austin Powers:

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