Jim "Ace Ventura" Carrey talks about getting crazy on- and offscreen, about having sex with a rug, about romancing Linda Ronstadt, and about his big summer movie The Mask.
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With his Bob's Big Boy do and relentless Silly Putty mugging, Jim Carrey doesn't exactly fit the profile of your traditional romantic figure in his out-of-the-blue smash hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. But while I was watching Ace, I noticed two nearby prepubescent girls who, when they weren't howling at Carrey's antics, were staring swooningly at him. So I asked Diane, my unfailingly accurate sex barometer pal, how she sized up Carrey's appeal. She replied instantly, paraphrasing Rosie Perez's take on Christian Slater in Untamed Heart, "I'd do him, if he weren't too funny in bed."
Although I'm guessing Jim Carrey is too funny just about everywhere, it's obvious these girls aren't crazy. Decked out in a wicked, vintage bowling shirt and black jeans, the star of Ace and the new, highly touted The Mask is surprisingly easy on the eye. And equally surprisingly, he's charming. Sweet, even. Right now, he could be flogging his new flick or the two others he's about to shoot back to back. Instead, he's happily reminiscing about his adolescent delight in flogging the old joystick. "I went through a big humping stage as a kid where I humped everything in the house," Carrey recalls. "Once I realized I could masturbate, I would literally wait only until everybody in my family went downstairs, then just find something, anything, to hump. At one point, the only thing left in the house I hadn't already humped was this fuzzy green rug beside my parents' bed. I saw it and went, 'Ohhhhh, wow, gotta have that rug.'
"So, one time, when everybody was downstairs doing whatever they were doing, I got completely naked, went into my parents' room and started humping the green rug and was, like, completely gone when I heard someone coming up the stairs. My father walked into the room and there I am on the floor on the opposite side of the bed, freaking out completely. I figure, I'll hide under the bed, 'cause he was never really observant, you know? So, I started getting under the bed, but I could only get halfway, so half my naked body's sticking out. I'm just praying for him not to see me, when I hear, 'Jim? Jim? Are you okay?' My world just started spinning. I stood up, completely naked, sort of yawned and went, 'Oh, wow, I must have fallen asleep.' I grabbed my underwear off his pillow and walked out while he's putting on his shirt, going, 'Well, better get washed up for dinner.'"
After a beat, Carrey adds, mock mournfully, "I had to break up with that green fuzzy rug." This cracks us both up, because when we met to talk in this sinisterly hip apartment adjacent to the photographer's studio where Carrey is later to be shot for this story, the owner (who leased it for use in Reservoir Dogs, by the way) warned: "That's a very expensive Oriental rug. Don't dirty it."
"He must have had a sense about me and rugs," Carrey quips.
"But, my, yes," he goes on, "I was a horny kid. I fantasized a lot about female vampires. I had a woody for some of my teachers, too. I remember one time I was just gawking at one of my teachers' breasts and watching her butt shake when she was chalking the board. In my mind, I was in complete la-la land, fantasizing about how she'd ask me to stay after school and then we'd ... Well, anyway, back in the real world, she turned around and, in the middle of class, looked at me and went, 'What the hell are you thinking? My God, I was bursting in my head."
Bursting in his head is what Carrey, who's been plying his trade for over 15 years, nearly always seems to be doing. He is beloved by millions for dancing that knife edge between the surreal and the flat-out silly. As one of few white cast members of Fox Broadcasting's "In Living Color," for example, he turned such characters as flame-broiled Fire Marshall Bill and steroid mama Vera de Milo into cult figures. As self-enchanted idiot savant Ace Ventura, he transforms the simple act of getting through a door into an antic ballet that comes off like James Bond grafted onto Inspector Clouseau spliced with Jerry Lewis in The Great Escape.
In real life, Carrey is often equally zippy. Trying to disarm Ace Ventura co-star Sean Young on her first day of shooting, he cracked her up by saying, "Sean, we're not going to put up with any of your psycho crap, got it?" He recently marched up to Steven Spielberg and quipped, "Hey, that Schindler's List wrap party must have been a blast." And, on meeting Schindler's star Liam Nee-son, he broke into a parody of one of that movie's final scenes, wailing, "If I had only sold my shoes. And these truck tires would have fetched a nice price on the market. I could have had a garage sale." This guy's got psycho energy to burn.
As famous and hot as he is right now, Carrey barely holds this psycho energy at bay. As he puts it, "I'm charming, but I dip into the Prozac now and then."
Perhaps self-doubts and mood enhancers are understandable, considering how, over the past 10 years, Carrey has gone from being a TV comic who years ago was expected to pop as the "next big thing" (his 1984 NBC series, "The Duck Factory," stiffed) to being an actor working his way up in small movie roles (Peggy Sue Got Married, Earth Girls Are Easy, The Dead Pool) and in big roles in TV movies (Doing Time on Maple Drive) to being the epicenter of a freak movie success (Ace Ventura's, homing in on $70 million, before video) to being a guy every studio in town wanted for their next project to being the star to whom New Line Cinema gave this deal: two flicks, tons of creative say-so, a minimum of $7 million. Each.
Given all this new success, I want to know exactly how impossible the 32-year-old has become. Big-time tantrums? Storming off the set? Demands for bigger trailers, private jets, a disposable retinue of flunkies and sex partners? "There's absolutely no change because I've always been impossible," Carrey retorts, laughing. "Actually, I don't think I'm impossible to deal with. The new stuff--the money, the numbers--they're so ridiculous, I look at it like a Monopoly board. So much of what's going on for me right now is like a juggling act. I mean, literally, after I talk with you, I've got to prepare to do this next movie, Dumb and Dumber--about two really stupid guys--then I've got to look at the script and give notes to the writers for the movie after that, The Best Man. So, the business side of it to me right now is like a hobby where I kind of like get on the phones, going, 'Yes!' into one, 'No!' into the other, 'New York? Sell! Dallas? Buy!'"
I tell Carrey I've heard he can get pretty rambunctious on the set when things don't fly his way. "I've had pretty good luck so far with the two recent movies I've done. There hasn't been what you'd call dissension with the cast and crew. But, okay, there have been moments here and there when the producer wants to move on and I feel, like, you know, it's important that we get something down that's right. So, you know, I'll start kicking shit and stuff, yeah. Just for the good of the piece. I mean, sure, now I've got a certain amount of power, responsibility, casting approvals, director approvals, but the 'thing' that's happened to me didn't happen overnight. It happened over years of ups and downs. I've been around L.A. for 12 years and it's always, 'When are you gonna get something that's gonna show what you can do?' Since I started out doing shows in Toronto, Canada, from the time I was, like, 18, articles came out that started predicting that I was gonna be as big as Johnny Carson in six months, as big as Richard Pryor. And people kept asking m 'When is it gonna happen?' And I'd go, 'Give me a week or so.' I've had people saying. 'This is it, your break, you'll never be able to walk in the street unrecognized again,' then, the next month, 'He's finished; he's had his shot.' I'm grateful it's been a slow, gradual build because, 10 years ago, there'd have been no way I could have handled the stuff, the pressures that I'm handling now. I'd have killed myself. Yeah, I worked my butt off and this is the way it was supposed to happen for me."
Although his butt is wanted by everybody in town at the moment, does Carrey actually think it's worth seven million? "I try not to think too much about it. But, what, I'm going to turn it down? I look at other actors, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks. I love their work, but I go, 'Hey, I'm talented, too. Why not me?' Before Ace it was like, 'We'll send you a script, Jim, but the first 10 pages are a little soiled.' Yeah, because they were the scripts Tom Hanks wiped his ass with. Now, I'm the first name that comes to their minds rather than being in the second wave."
Being on the crest of the first wave can be pretty crazy. Recently, Carrey tried to slip in unobtrusively to see Ace Ventura in an Atlanta theater, but the management, so excited to spot him, sent around staff members to trail him with walkie-talkies, going, "The eagle has landed." They even left on the house lights throughout the movie so that the rest of the audience could ogle.
The wave can also bring good stuff, like the fabulous babes. Then again, when Carrey was 21 years old, he was having an affair with Linda Ronstadt, who was 37 at the time. What was that like? "We met at The Comedy Store when she was looking for an opening act," he recalls, smiling. "Instead, we took a shine to each other. She's a very cool lady, very smart, a very good person. We didn't live together, but I spent a lot of time in 'the big house.' For me, it was exciting, going to parties. She taught me how to act older than I was. It was something I knew was never going to amount to anything, but something really good. Now I get a lot of phone numbers I don't use. I have a ton of opportunities, but I'm not a dog about it or anything. I was married for seven years and have just gone through a divorce. It's very difficult when I've met people I've really dug--it's like I have to put a disclaimer in there all the time, 'Look, I'm going to be going crazy for a while and I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do, but I'm certainly not gonna commit to another relationship for a while.'"
And how does Carrey deal with the other kinds of crazy stuff that go with sudden stardom: fawning hangers-on, yes men, isolation, the potential Eddie Murphy trip? "I don't ever want to get jaded or lazy or let things slide by," Carrey asserts. "I'm trying to do now what Rodney Dangerfield used to tell me: 'Make the tank strong enough so that nobody's fuckup can stop it.'"
Carrey's tank really got rolling when Ace Ventura, despite a critical drubbing, won him fans by the zillions. I tell him that I caught the movie only the previous night, when I was dead certain that this interview was going to come off. And I laughed more than I care to admit. But, funny as he is in this cinematic dementia, doesn't he think they got lucky? "Every day we were shooting, Tom [Shadyac, the co-writer and director] and I would just look at each other and go, 'What the hell are we doing, man?' Because we knew that somebody, like the Siskels and Ebairs of the world--" Carrey revels in pronouncing the pudgy Ebert's name in a haughty, "r"-rolling Parisian accent-- "was going to hate it. Yes, Siskel and Ebair had their field day with me. They don't take into account that we tried to do something different, that we went out on a limb. I see 1994 as the year that America decided to take 'Two thumbs down' as a recommendation to go out and see a movie. As soon as I heard about their review, I told the studio, 'Put that in the fucking ad, man!'"
So, is Carrey telling me that he thinks the critics were wrong? That the flick was actually good? Not exactly. "[The producers] were after me for about two years to do the project. And I hated the script, which if it had been shot as is, would have been embarrassing, horrible. It was not doable. I told them, 'The only thing I like about this is that it's a pet detective.' Then they brought on Tom, who had an interesting slant on things and was completely clued in to where I needed to be. For the first big movie out of the box, I thought it was important to give the audience Jim Carrey full-out. [The studio] said, basically, 'You can rewrite it from page one' and they gave me script approval."
How does Carrey describe his creation, Ace? "When I sat down with Tom, I said, Rock'n'roll sensibility. Ace looks different from anybody you'll see on the street. He's brilliant, has incredible instincts like Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't give a shit. He's not an anarchist, really, but someone with a problem with authority. He goes crazy in those situations. This is a lot like me He's not only gotta get all the women, he's got to satisfy them to the nth degree, to the point where it's ridiculous. He's gotta be able to fight, fuck, and figure things out. He's completely confident, which is always sexy, because you know when a guy is that confident, he's got a big dick. In fact, for the sequel, instead of the camera starting on his shoes, maybe we'll start on his dick."
If things keep popping for Carrey, who earned $350,000 to play Ace (extra for helping salvage the script) and could grab as much as $10 million for the sequel, should he want Ace II to open on Ace's joint, that's what he'll get. But the experience he calls "the best time of my life, yet the worst time of my life" took its toll. "At the same I time I was doing Ace, my marriage was falling apart," he explains. "There were times I had to be sent home from the set because I was so out of it. The cliché-ness of what happens with marriages busting up in Hollywood bothers me. I mean, shooting the movie was like walking on the moon, then you come home and it's, 'Take out the garbage,' and you're like, 'You don't understand: I just planted the flag!' It must have been like living with a caged animal." We're about to get another blast of Carrey's many sides in The Mask, the id action-fantasy based on the best-selling Dark Horse comic book of the same name. Some industry pundits have been predicting it could be one of the movies of the summer. The flick, which features Carrey in dual roles, has leading-edge special effects by Industrial Light and Magic and a musical production number featuring the star backed by a chorus of 50 dancing policemen.
"Every generation needs a Jekyll and Hyde story and this is a good twist on that," he says of the film in which he plays a meek bank clerk who happens on an ancient mask with transformational powers that turn him into a fabulous alter ego, The Mask. He declares the finished movie "the kind of thing that, if I were a kid, I would say, 'Dad, if you don't take me to see this, I'll make your life a living hell.'
"The Mask persona is Fred Astaire on acid, Jim Carrey out of his mind," Carrey continues. "He's someone who, when he walks into a room, is gonna fuck it till it bleeds, leaving everyone to go, 'Ooooooh, what just happened?' The protagonist, Stanley Ipkiss, is a genuinely sweet guy who just wants to be kind to people and gets run over all the time--kind of like my father, the sweetest guy in the world. What was so great is that preview audiences they've shown it to really like sweet, nice Stanley as much or more than The Mask. That, after being so 'cartoon' as Ace, makes me really happy."
Jim Carrey grew up Catholic in Burlington and Jackson's Point, both suburbs of Toronto. "Like most Catholic boys," he recalls, "I wanted to be Jesus Christ. I could never get the turn-the-other-cheek thing down, though." His father, "a great guy," was a sax-and-clarinet man who had once fronted his own orchestra and later became a company controller, despite being "an awful businessman." When Carrey's father lost the job after nearly 30 years, Carrey and his brother and sisters had to drop out of high school to work as janitors and k security guards in a tirerim factory.
"I look at stuff that's happened in my life like it's The Grapes of Wrath" he says, with a jaunty shrug. "You know, you'll always win in the end if you don't let the problems make you angry. I've been through some wild times. When my father lost his job and I was 13, we went from lower-middle class to complete poverty, living in a Volkswagen camper. My father was not good at business because he was too nice. I learned from that, not to be too nice when it comes down to the crunch. I definitely have an edge because of all that. But nothing made me go, 'Life sucks, people suck.' I now want to make sure that my daughter Jane's financial future is as secure as I can possibly make it. That I'll be able to look after myself when I'm old. That drives me. Definitely."
"I've always believed in magic," Carrey continues. "When I wasn't doing anything in this town, I'd go up every night, sit on Mulholland Drive, look out at the city, stretch out my arms and say, 'Everybody wants to work with me. I'm a really good actor. I have all kinds of great movie offers.' I'd just repeat these things over and over, literally convincing myself that I had a couple of movies lined up. I'd drive down that hill, ready to take the world on, going, 'Movie offers are out there for me. I just don't hear them yet.' It was like total affirmations, antidotes to the stuff that stems from my family background, from knowing how things can go sour. Still, I've had times that, when I'd walk down the street, I'd look at the street people and feel like, 'I'm already one of them. I'm already there.' I mean, I can scare the shit out of myself."
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.