Jim Carrey: Carrey'd Away

Would he care to elaborate? "I've gotten to points in my life where I just wasn't dealing with things, holding in anger, things like that. I've been to the place I believe is the edge of a nervous breakdown. I've been to the place where I was afraid to get out of bed because 'somebody' was going to grab me, or where you're having those dreams, you know, about stuff like strangling your mother. I've been to the edge. I like better where I'm at now. What's great about being a comic is you get to speak what everybody's thinking. I look out at an audience of 2000 people, thinking, 'This is what I do to let my shit out. What do you guys have to release all that? You guys have nothing.' I have to have an outlet or I'll explode."

Leaning forward, Carrey confides, very quietly, "Four years ago, I made out a check for $10,000 to 'Jim Carrey, for acting services rendered.' I put it in my wallet. It's been there for four years. And, by Thanksgiving, 1995, guess what? I've already paid for my daughter's college tuition and I bought a 1965 robin's-egg blue T-bird convertible, mint condition, and I'll be able to get a really nice house. Nothing extravagant. See, I've always believed that everything I've wanted, prayed for, will come to me in one way or another. I'm real careful about what I ask for. I asked God when I was young to give me whatever I need to help me be a great actor-comedian. So, okay, it's like now you're going to be poverty-stricken, now you're going to go through a divorce. I've always seen these things as, 'This is a rock in my way for me to learn how to get over.' Like, I expected to get on 'Saturday Night Live,' do that trip, but that didn't happen. But I got on 'In Living Color.' You may not always get where you expected but, so long as you get somewhere, who cares?"

As it turns out, much of Hollywood cares about Carrey's next "somewhere," because producers and studios hope that he is on his way to profitable and, hopefully, hilarious stops. Lately, one hears that Fox, Universal, Disney and, heck, even auteur Jerry Lewis, to whom's manic style Carrey's has often been compared, have been courting him. "Jerry Lewis wanted me to do a remake of The Patsy," Carrey says, referring to Lewis's 1964 movie about a bellhop rushed in to replace a dead comedian. "But he did what he did like nobody else in the world, so I turned it down, because I don't want to step into his legend. I mean, I always want to come back to doing something like Ace, and the ideas for the next Ace movie are growing out of me like fungus. But I also want to travel in different directions: uplifting work, serious work, stuff about vulnerable characters that people can laugh at."

Which, he says, is what attracted him to making Dumb and Dumber, the supporting cast of which includes Teri Garr, and, for the part he had hoped Nicolas Cage would take as dumb to Carrey's dumber, Jeff Daniels. "Nic and I were itching to do something together, but he had done, like, seven comedies in a row and wanted to do a smaller project." Some predict that Cage and Carrey may instead do The Best Man, about a guy who summons his long-lost pal to be his best man at his wedding, not knowing that, in the years since they haven't seen each other, his chum has become a certifiable crackpot. Guess who'll play the title role?

"My job is to go out there where normal people would have the good sense not to go. When you watch old Chaplin movies, he didn't just butter the bread or kiss the girl, he did something magical with it. I want people to say about my work that I'm doing some really unusual stuff and that, in my work, I always had a good heart."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed producer Denise Di Novi for the June Movieline.

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