Jim Carrey's high-wire act continues. The anarchic silliness of the past gets its new due in The Cable Guy, but there are Robin Williams-like changes ahead for the screen's most relentless and successful mugger.
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Jim Carrey strides into the landmark building in downtown L.A., looking like a young, freshly-scrubbed Jimmy Stewart on uppers. The first thing I do is check him out for signs of encroaching madness and incipient asshole-itis. After all, since he and I last met and kicked around such topics as his occasional dips into Prozac, he has run riot through an unprecedented string of blockbusters-- The Mask, Dumb & Dumber, Ace Ventura deux and Batman Forever--and he has bumped up his take for the soon-to-be-released The Cable Guy and soon-to-be-filmed Liar, Liar to $20 million each. He's even been a presenter on the Oscars. Head-rearranging stuff, indeed. And it's not as if storm warnings haven't been broadcast. When Carrey and the original director of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls didn't exactly spark, the star was widely believed to have been instrumental in getting the director cashiered. Consider, too, that Carrey went through a snarly divorce from his first wife, Melissa, who reportedly refused his $500,000 settlement to hold out for something more along the lines of $5 million to $10 million. Then there are the rumors that Carrey's relationship with the funny, beauteous Lauren Holly, begun in the wake of his ruined marriage, is now also on the rocks.
Adrenaline rushes and bouts of depression or not, Carrey arrives today sans entourage and absolutely free of the on-screen manic behavior that makes some people scream with laughter, but suggests to others the ravages of advanced Tourette's syndrome. Sure, he strikes me as a guy with armies of imps and demons on constant maneuvers in his fractured psyche, but he's not flamenco dancing on the edge of the abyss. He appears, instead, to have his demons double-harnessed and pulling all-night shifts.
We park ourselves at a game table on which sits an ornate antique pistol, presumably not loaded. Something John Wilkes Booth might have used on Lincoln or the very thing Renny Harlin might have been tempted to turn on himself during Cutthroat Island. Carrey studies the piece, whips himself into ersatz 'Nam-damage and rasps, "Wanna play Russian roulette, Deer Hunter-style?"
How, I ask, is his head doing these days? I've noted that the new dyed-black shade of his hair and brows has converted his normally pleasant, slightly wiggy Mayberry good looks into something distinctively more working-class, brooding and, somehow, Canadian. "I can't get used to my head right now," he confides. "I dyed my hair black just before I started shooting The Cable Guy and immediately got completely in the doldrums. I couldn't lift myself out of it, because every time I looked in the mirror, I didn't like myself. It definitely put me in a weird place."
All this was necessary for The Cable Guy? "'The movie is a combination of hilarious and really unsettling. The role itself is very, very funny, but it's deeply disturbing. Putting myself in this guy's character all the time is a tough thing to do. I get so depressed that some days I can't even...well, let's say it's very bizarre."
Wait a second. Isn't The Cable Guy just a comedy in which Carrey's aggressively lonely cable installer bedevils sweet, non-assertive cable subscriber Matthew Broderick? Besides which, it's not the first insane hairdo that's ever sat on Carrey's head--there was Ace Ventura's pomaded, cool-jerk tidal wave, the Greco-Romanesque 'do of Dumb & Dumber (co-opted, apparently, by Brad Pitt and George Clooney and so many others), the Riddler's orange sherbet spikes. "It's deeply disturbing to play this guy who is, like, 'the friend who needs too much,'" says Carrey. "He's a guy whose mother sat him in front of a television and went out looking for guys, so he grew up with the Partridge Family's mother as a surrogate. He needs a friend really, really bad and drives Matthew Broderick insane because of that need. This character has messed with me. I go home feeling this guy. I tell you, man, I can't wait to shave my head."
So, might one presume that this cable guy's neediness strikes a chord in Carrey, whose family history (depression, near-homelessness, illnesses real and imagined) sounds more like a family out of Eugene O'Neill than out of sitcomland? "Well, I'm just a freak like the rest of us," he concedes, grinning like a baby grand. "I'd say I've had an even flow of neediness through my whole life, and I got kind of clever about it early. I remember starting out imitating records in the back of the classroom, and when the teacher singled me out and tried to make me feel embarrassed by saying, 'Get up and do that in front of the whole class,' it marked the end of all normal life. I got up, did it in front of the whole class and learned that committing myself to getting a reaction was very addicting."
So, is Carrey still in the grip of this addiction? "For sure, I have an unnatural need to be noticed or liked. But I don't necessarily gear everything to an audience, going, What are they going to want? I'm not afraid to become a different thing, because I believe talent finds its audience. It's just like the Beatles. They didn't stay put. They changed, made a lot of enemies, lost fans, gained new ones."
Comparing himself to the Beatles, hmm? Has megalomania whupped him upside his head, maybe? Well, since he's inviting comparisons to the Beatles, does he see himself eventually cutting a kind of maharishi, turn-off-your-mind-relax-and-float-downstream groove? "I'm already way past that," Carrey answers, a nicely crazed gleam in his eyes. "I'm already aware of the all-powerful Oz guy behind the curtain. I'm self-educating right now. I have three books going at any one time, I'm reading Plato's The Republic, Intensity by Dean Koontz--which is just, Kill, kill, kill!--and I can never get enough self-help, so I'm also reading Wherever You Go, There You Are. All this self-help stuff helps because we all spend so much time worrying about what the plan is. The only real time we have is the present. That's your life. If you spend all your time worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, you don't really live. It's like Our Town, man."
At this Carrey falls into an uncharacteristic lull, then proceeds, "I'm trying to learn. See, with my first marriage--and this is still a problem--normal, nonwork life was tough. It's a very difficult thing to walk out there, be creative, go through all the craziness, get all the praise, then just go home. Calming myself down is really, really hard."
I have heard that Carrey can pitch a conniption fit with the best of them. Is he wrestling with this too? "One of my biggest problems is that I can't take criticism very well," he asserts. "Not criticism of my work--that keeps me level--but personal criticism, like how I relate to people. Those things can send me into an emotional tailspin." And what does such a tailspin look like? "It looks like me punching a statue and breaking my knuckle. Me wanting to go into a dark room and stay there for three days. Something inside of me feels like shit when somebody tells me I'm not behaving correctly. I'm in a good place right now. I mean, I'm not the Ritalin Kid. But I have dark moods--yeah, I have all the dynamics someone needs to have in this business." Well. I don't know about you, but I'm writing off the Holly relationship.
In which case, I feel compelled to ask if Carrey is still raising his spirits occasionally with Prozac, which he told me two years ago he took now and again. "I don't need it quite as much," he declares. "I'm enjoying my different states of mind. I try not to indulge in any of them for very long, but there definitely is a time to brood, a time to be completely joyful, a time to be out of control. Buddhists would tell you, 'Stay in the middle of the wheel,' rather than fly around the outside, up, down, all over. That's a difficult concept for me because I feed off highs and lows. That's my business, you know? Nobody wants to go to a movie to see somebody who is in the middle of the wheel. They want to see somebody get desperate. I'm trying to find the balance."
If the box-office receipts for Carrey's last five movies are any indicator, audiences want to see him get intensely, cosmically silly. For awhile it was hip to put down Carrey as a kind of unholy offspring of some mythical gang bang involving Betty Hutton, Jerry Lewis. Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams. Slowly, though, the brainiacs came around. No less a critic than Pauline Kael emerged from retirement to praise Dumb & Dumber.
Newsweek's Jack Kroll compared Carrey not unfavorably to such movie comedy giants as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Then again, plenty of people prefer to slam Carrey for contributing to the dumbing of America. "It pisses me off sometimes," he says, kicking the table leg by accident. I think. "I mean, not to the point where I'm losing sleep over it, but, look: comedy's comedy. I know there are critics who think that I'm an idiot. I would say to those critics, 'There's a person here who is growing every day. If I'm still doing Dumb & Dumber at 50, then you can give me shit." It bothers me that somebody would accuse me of dumbing America, because I'm not a teacher. I want to say, 'You educate America if you think it's so dumb. I just want to make people laugh.'"
Moving on to a different area of criticism, I ask Carrey whether he thinks he is, as alleged, undirectable. Did that have anything to do with the departure of the first director of the Ace Ventura sequel? "I love direction," he insists. "I'm completely directable. I don't want to be the one solely responsible. I'm a spewer, I keep myself alive by changing things, but I'm also never completely sure of where I am. I can try 50 different ways of doing something till I feel I'm insane. I want someone to say, That one, not that one.' you know? I read an article recently where Steven Spielberg said that if he recast Jaws today, he would put me in the Richard Dreyfuss role and sit on me. You know what? I would love to be sat on."
Sure, but doesn't he ever get vocal? "OK, I've stood up in the middle of the scene and gone, 'I'm exhausted. I cannot do this anymore. I don't care what happens. Sue me.' Or else I'm in a terrible mood one day, which happens from time to time, because it's such an emotional business. I'll call later on and say to whomever, 'Don't take it personally.' People see that I'm working really hard. I don't think anyone can accuse me of being unreasonable."
Speaking of unreasonable, I'd heard that the Batman Forever set was a hotbed of egos, insecurities and upstaging. Any war stories, particularly given the close proximity of such prickly pears as Val Kilmer and Tommy Lee Jones? "I want to be challenged," Carrey declares. "The way to grow is to have someone tell you, 'Well, OK, Tommy Lee Jones is going to play with you,' so it's like. 'OK, Desperate Boy, you're on.' It's good to have a little fear. That was one of those scary moments where you go. "Well, this is the big leagues now. Put up or shut up.' Tommy messed with me a little bit. The night before my biggest scene in the movie he said some pretty nasty things to me, along the lines of 'You're from cabaret and I'm a trained classical actor.' Whatever, That's the business. I'm just fine."
Maybe it's some less-than-tender memories of Tommy Lee, but I notice Carrey eyeing the pistol on the table. "Got one of those, now that you're way more famous than the last time we talked?? I ask. "I know how to shoot a gun, yeah," he asserts. "I don't like guns. But I have people who can carry guns. And do carry them. Luckily, I don't get a lot of nutsy people, though. For the most part, knock on wood, I've never had somebody get really goofy with me."
Only for the most part, huh? "Well, I've had situations where crowds were pushing out of control," he says. "Lauren and I went to Vegas to see the 20-second Tyson fight, and that was one of the worst security systems I ever witnessed. Shaquille O'Neal was trapped in a little boutique in the hotel lobby with people packed against the glass. Lauren and I had seven guys around us with their heads down, going, 'Go-go-go-go-go!" Lauren was getting kicked, her hair pulled--people were just trying to get something of her, you know? It was insane and scary."
What about the Brentwood mansion in which he lives, not far from the scene of the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murders, a crime site by which flows a constant stream of rubberneckers, crime junkies and just plain freaks? "Not sorry I bought it," he declares. "I don't have any real trouble there. I have security at the house and I've got a big Great Dane too. Say what you want about putting in all the alarms, a Great Dane is the best security going."
On the notion of security of another sort, I wonder if superstardom and megabucks have done anything to undermine Carrey's confidence that those who stay close to him do so for what he represents. "I feel good about the people around me." he observes. "I can tell there are certain people that are nicer to me than they are to normal people. There's nothing I can do about that--that's their hell."
Still, finding the right significant other can cause migraines when your internal klieg lights glare like Carrey's do right now. Gossip columnists and telejournalists sniped at him and Holly for seeming to be a cliché Hollywood couple, particularly those who believed Carrey scuttled his first wife--the one who came up with him through the lean years--once his ship came in. Now they're honing in on his break with Holly. About this, Carrey is willing to volunteer almost nothing. "Gossip in this country is out of control," he says, with a discernible edge. "Lauren and I came to look at it as a silly game of cat-and-mouse. When I'm at some event and being chased by the paparazzi, which is the Italian weird for "bad career choice.' I could turn around, smile, chat and give them everything they want. I guess. But then, it wouldn't be special, would it?
"Basically," Carrey continues, "watching Lauren and me trying to get together was like that movie about storms, Twister. It's hard enough making a relationship work when people are in kind of normal, nine-to-five lives. But we were like two doctors on call. It's just really hard."
Why, I ask Carrey, do male movie comics, not traditionally Hollywood Adonises, so often partner spectacular women? "Big dicks," he says, grinning. "A surface-to-air missile-type dick. Look at Milton Berle, Charlie Chaplin. I mean, I'm sure there's probably some real little-dick comics out there with tremendous senses of humor who make pithy, witty, Oscar Wilde-type comments. Ah, but the rest of us..."
Wondering whether Carrey was always a babe magnet, I ask him if he has any special memories of his first kiss. "It was playing spin the bottle as an 11-year-old," he recalls, "with, I think, this girl named Tammy, in a whole group of nasty little 11-year-olds. It was great. I remember my first orgasm more, though. I was fully clothed and I just basically kind of lost it. It was shocking to me, because I felt as though I had felt it before. I was hugging and caressing and suddenly something came over me. I remember recognizing the feeling and I don't know how that could be unless, as Socrates would say, there's just some kind of deep knowledge of such things that's already deeply embedded in our psyches."
I have to ask: was the object of Carrey's first Big O animate or inanimate? He did, after all, once tell me that he went through an adolescent stage where he lusted after a particular shag rug in his parent's bedroom. "It was animate," he recalls, "although I wasn't very discerning at that point. Although now, just thinking of that rug... I mean, it's that old thing--the carpet you can't have is the one that drives you crazy. To this day, I do a double lake when I see those rug salesmen on the side of the road. It's a good thing I don't get into an accident."
These days, Carrey could buy pretty much any carpet--or anything else he pleases, for that matter. "The hardest part about it is people know how much money you make," he insists, telling me that he still has the vintage T-bird on which he splurged when the big bucks started coming in, "Money doesn't faze me at all. It goes into an account and then I basically do what I need to do with it. The money takes a little of your fear away--you know, fear of the future. This country is pretty scary if you don't build some kind of nest egg for yourself. I don't go buy Maseratis, because I've never been impressed with stuff like that at all. I'll probably end up with two houses, someplace to escape to and someplace in the city, I'm pretty basic. I understand the dynamic of people who medicate themselves with things, but it always seemed hollow to me."
Having read recently how Tom Hanks was quoted as saying he had yet to receive all his Forrest Gump money, I wonder whether anyone in Hollywood actually ever gets all his money. "Oh, he'll wait for years for that to trickle in," Carrey says. "See, the number in the paper is one thing, but then there's 35 percent off the top for commissions, then there's taxes, so the $20 million check becomes $5.5 million. That's amazing money, but it's not $20 million. I could freak out. too, when I pick up variety and realize that the movie for which I got paid $20 million made, worldwide, $300 to S500 million. Then, of course, the studios have employees to pay and the cost of the movie and this and that, so they don't end up with that money, either. Believe me, I don't gloat about the money. People have lost fortunes that make mine look microscopic. You can never count on it for sure. People that do that are asking for trouble."
Does he still hold up Hanks's career as a model of what his could be? "We're in different places." he observes. "Tom Hanks is the royalty of the business right now and it's well deserved. I love his work and he seems like a great guy. I'm kind of a different generation. He's a little older than I am, so we're not necessarily up for the same things. I'm getting a lot of projects now, sifting through a lot of material. I don't want to lose touch with the funny, but I also want to tell stories. I really want to expand. Or maybe 'contract' is a better word for it."
We kick around the subject of the vagaries of fame, talking about people who were as big as Hanks or Carrey but who then took precipitous falls from bad choices, personality problems and combinations thereof. "I could screw up, say the wrong thing and my career would be over like that," Carrey says. "It's possible it could be over tomorrow. Every time you do one of those live interviews at a premiere or something, you risk saying something embarrassing and becoming uncool overnight. I just go into it head-long and hope for the best."
Although Carrey's future dance card includes such crowd-pleasers as another Mask movie, he is very businesslike in his intention to expand his audience and widen his range. When it comes to choosing projects, he says, "Very rarely do I jump up and say on my own. 'I must do this!' I have a lot of people who look at material and give me their opinions. It's like the President--he doesn't make a move without his aides, which is a smart way to be if you trust the Opinions of the people on your team."
Carrey may actually be courting an Oscar statuette of his own by hitching up with Peter Weir, who, in Witness and Dead Poets Society, guided Harrison Ford and Robin Williams to performances that took their careers in new directions. "He's awesome," Carrey declares of the director who will be his copilot through The Truman Show, a story about a guy who realizes he doesn't have a real life, he's just part of a TV show. "The first meeting we had he was over to my house playing me Pink Floyd cuts. He was explaining the character in a scene, and he suddenly got up, leaving me at the dining room table, to curl up in the corner for a long time. I loved that, because that's the way I am, too-- as soon as I have an idea, it goes right to my core, and I have to stand up and do something, I've got a feeling that, like me, he's a spewer, too. We just throw ideas against a wall--blam, blam, blam!--keep creating until the last second. He's not dogmatic, either. Whenever we talk, he'll throw something at me, then go, 'Please tell me if I say something stupid.'"
Carrey may soon be working with Ron Howard, as well. Pretty heady stuff seems to loom dead-ahead for a guy who once fell into a funk when he lost the comic lead in Sixteen Candles to Anthony Michael Hall. But he makes it clear that no matter how tony his future projects get, he'll have a taste for anarchy. Laughing delightedly, he says, "Sometimes, I'll be sitting with a really serious director talking about a project and I'll go, 'I think what this piece really needs is a little bit more mugging. And possibly, I'll just spaz out every once in awhile.' And I watch their faces drain of blood. I love to mug, though. Richard Belzer once said that someone should just attach a handle to the side of my head."
What about that remake of the Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith gave a blistering performance as a guy turned sour by fame? No mugging allowed there. "I love melodrama and I'm drawn to the tragic feeling of that great stuff with Elia Kazan--James Dean in East of Eden, On the Waterfront. To remake one of Kazan's classics is a pretty scary prospect, but there's a whole generation of kids who don't even know who the Beatles were who should see this story. They wouldn't go rent the Kazan version, although they should. So, you're not necessarily trying to make it better, just trying to make it your own and do it in a new form. When I rent movies, it's never comedies. I try to get the heaviest drama available, like Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in At Close Range--dad and son with guns in each other's faces. That's what I loved about Leaving Las Vegas. They found the light in such horribly sad subject matter. Nic Cage has got elephant balls. I've seen him make choices in films where everybody wants him fired. He's the Picasso of what we're trying to do. He's like, 'Why can't both eyes be on the left side of the face? Why does it have to be literal?' The guy has elephant balls."
As Carrey and I bid goodbye until next time, I ask about his immediate plans after The Cable Guy. "I'm going to get my bunion fixed." He isn't kidding. "I have this horrible bunion from brutalizing myself while I'm working. I'll have to lie in bed for awhile, so I'll get a lot of reading done, and I hope they give me a lot of pain medication. I'll just be Vicodin Boy. After that, I just want to go all over the place in movies and throw the hounds off the trail every now and again,"
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis for the April '96 Movieline.