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Features
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Carrey at a Crossroads
Where does the 43-year-old funnyman see himself going after the upcoming Christmas release Fun with Dick and Jane? Even last fall, he wasn’t entirely sure.
Monday, May 2, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Carrey at Snicket premiere
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No matter how many serious movies Jim Carrey makes, it seems like he will always be a bit of a goof. For every Truman Show, there’s a Me, Myself & Irene. For every Majestic, a Grinch. And most recently, he countered his dramatic turn in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a comedic one in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, now available on DVD.
Bu despite their egregiously long and eccentric titles, Carrey says his two latest characters aren’t quite as far apart as those in films past. “I think the two me’s are definitely meeting in the middle in some respects,” says Carrey, speaking to FilmStew at the time of Lemony’s theatrical release from the solace of an interview aerie at Los Angeles’ Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “I don’t know. I just feel incredibly lucky to be able to go all over the place.”
“I seem to have tripped into a time in my career whatever that people rarely get to do, the diversity of roles that I’m doing, so I feel incredibly lucky.”
Nominated six times for a Golden Globe and twice victorious - for Man on the Moon and The Truman Show - Carrey came up once again empty-handed on the Oscar nomination front for 2004. But the actor points to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman as the true star of his latest work and sure enough, it was Kaufman who shared in an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth.
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Columbia Pictures
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Fun with Jim and Tea
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“Basically, in Eternal Sunshine, the script is the star; the idea,” Carrey suggests. “It so touched a nerve in me, the idea of being made invisible. The idea that I think most of us at some point have felt, that feeling of someone kind of erasing them, like what they had together didn’t mean anything, and that’s probably the most brutal thing to feel when you’ve been with somebody.”
Regardless of the overall imbalance between the Golden Globes and MTV Movie Awards on the one hand and that little golden statuette on the other, Carrey – now a comfortable 43 years old – insists he no longer frets over the prospect of individual acclaim. “Reviews, awards, all of those things are beautiful when they go your way,” he says. “It’s fantastic. It’s a great thing, but for me it’s all about the work, it’s about moment to moment on the set, there’s no place I’d rather be than acting with other people and telling a story. I just love it, and it’s refuge. So that’s really what I’m motivated by in every respect.”
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Paramount Pictures
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Another memorable character
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When asked which of his many starring roles was most satisfying on a personal level, Carrey points without hesitation to Sunshine: “Not only [because of] the depth of emotion and the feeling of loss that the character was going through, but just the idea of being less accessible as a person on film,” he explains. “To hold back completely and let the audience come to you was just a different kind of thing for me. Generally, I play fairly colorful characters who come out of the screen and this one was inviting you to come in. So it was different.”
But not unlike a lot of other successful Hollywood actors, Carrey says he sometimes has to acquiesce to another bombastic and commercially successful comedic role simply in order to make happen other less visibly lucrative opportunities. “The worst thing about being a celeb is, and it’s probably true of many walks of life, that you can’t be yourself all the time,” he confesses. “Sometimes you have to toe the line and do what you have to do. I like [Lemony Snicket], but there are plenty of times when people have to go out and do this kind of thing when they don’t even like the movie. So you just hate yourself afterwards. You’re like, ‘I just hate myself, I’m such a liar.’”
“Expectation is a hard thing to deal with.”
When it comes to eccentric and singular roles such as Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket, there is a generally held conception that the actor must ‘Carrarize’ it in order to generate many of the quirks of character. “Carrarize it,” he says, laughing at the word. “Sanitize it and Carrarize it.”
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Director Brad Silberling
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Referring to the villainous Count Olaf, he says, “This one was discovered by my manager’s son Sam, who is 11 years old, was reading the books and said, ‘Jim has to play Count Olaf. It’s him.’ So that’s how that came about. Of course, as soon as I jumped onboard I said, ‘Okay, guys, I need the greatest creative minds in this room to Carrarize this thing,’” he adds jokingly.
In putting his stamp on Olaf and essentially tapping the megalomaniac side of his personality, Carrey admits things occasionally got out of hand when it came to keeping a firm grasp on the film’s storytelling. “There was a lot of improvisation and there is a ton of stuff that’s not in the movie that is really funny that doesn’t further the story,” he confesses. “I face that a lot, actually. I have to kill babies. They call it killing babies in Hollywood, where the baby’s got to die.”
With Olaf arguably marking a crossroads between the hyperactive roles Carrey authored early in his career and the more introspective ones he tackled later on, Carrey says that he’s not entirely sure in which direction he’ll go next, beyond the remake of Fun with Dick and Jane with Téa Leoni. “It’s going to be all on individual inspirations. I want to do something different.”
He also says that no matter what kind of movies he picks from now on, he refuses to grow an over-inflated sense of importance about the contributions his films make to culture and society at large. “I don’t kid myself into thinking I’m changing the world with this stuff, but I know that people can enjoy themselves for a couple of hours,” he explains. “When I really sit down and think about it, sometimes I’m a Band-Aid and sometimes I’m a little bit of the cure. But it’s not going to change the world, I don’t think.”
“I know we try to mythologize everything in Hollywood so everything is blown out of proportion, but I make movies that make people feel good for like two hours. That’s my thing I do in life and I’m okay with that. That’s enough, I guess.”
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