Jim Carrey
Words By Bret Love
As the old saying goes, “comedy is tragedy plus time.” And whether it’s Richard Pryor being raised in his grandmother’s brothel, Damon Wayans getting mocked as a child for his clubbed foot, or Margaret Cho’s Korean parents abandoning her to the care of strangers for the first seven years of her life, the biographies of many comedians attest to the truth of that statement. It’s a widely held belief that tragic childhoods produce the best comedic minds, and anyone who spends much time on the standup circuit knows that the mask of humor often hides a past (or, in some cases, present) tinged with pain.
Few people would have accused Jim Carrey of possessing such depth when he first broke out in the early ’90s. Initially known as the rubber-faced white guy on
Fox’s sketch comedy hit “In Living Color,” in 1994 he unleashed a trio of gleefully sophomoric family films (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb & Dumber) that collectively earned well over $300 million at the US box office alone. Making a swift transition from outrageous TV goofball to big screen physical comedian, Carrey established himself as a manic talent willing to do virtually anything in his quest for a laugh. According to the 45-year-old Ontario native, that desire for approval began when he was very young.
“For years, I was the entertainment,” he recalls with a bemused smile. “I’d get a knock in the middle of the night and my parents would say, ‘Get your tap shoes on, because there’s company!’ So I was always doing shows and was always the center of attention. I got that from my father. When I was a little kid I remember we had family gettogethers, and I’d watch him captivate the room and be so animated. I thought, ‘Wow, so that’s how you get over the world.’ I was always trying to be like him.”
Though reluctant to talk about his childhood early on in his career, Carrey has become increasingly revealing over the years, particularly when it comes to honoring the memory of his father, “He was an amazing guy—so funny, so creative and also my champion. When I did something creative, he didn’t go, ‘What are you doing that for?’ It was like, ‘Look what Jim’s doing!’ He encouraged it, so he’s huge in my heart.”
This encouragement led Jim, the youngest of four children, to become an incurable extrovert; he was granted a few minutes to perform standup routines for his classmates at the end of each school day in exchange for agreeing to reign in his class clown tendencies the rest of the day. But his adolescence took a turn for the worse when his family was forced to relocate from their cozy hometown to a suburb in Toronto, where they all took security and janitorial jobs at a factory, with Jim working eight-hour shifts after school. His grades and morale suffered as a result of this, and things got even worse when the destitute family had to live out of a Volkswagen camper van after quitting the factory. It was not long afterwards that Carrey dropped out of high school, made his comedy debut at a local Toronto club, and headed off to Los Angeles at the age of 17 to seek his fortune.
It took 15 years for Carrey to make the climb up the ladder to the top of Hollywood’s A-list, but once he did, he became the most successful actor in the world. He had two more blockbuster comedies with Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and Liar Liar and shocked the industry
I’m the luckiest guy in the world and I know it. I get a lot of people who w ant to love me. Some days I don’t love myself.
by earning his first $20 million paycheck for The Cable Guy. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the bank: Carrey decided to get serious, making three dramatic films (The Truman Show, Simon Birch and the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon) that forced audiences to reconsider their preconceived notions of him as a grinning goofball. He won two Golden Globes for his efforts, but the Oscar nominations most insiders anticipated never materialized, and Carrey was notoriously indignant at being overlooked by the Academy.
Now, he seems to take such snubs in stride. “I don’t think there was a conspiracy,” he says diplomatically. “There’s a lot that goes on with voting for Academy Awards. I don’t think there’s an accumulation of people out there saying, ‘Let’s talk about what we’re gonna do with Jim. Okay, maybe [we’ll give him an Oscar] in 10 years, but not now!’ I just don’t think they’re doing that.”
Asked about his recent tendency to veer between serious dramatic roles like the emotionally devastating Joel in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and scene-stealing fiends such as the cunning Count Olaf in family-friendly fare such as Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Carrey explains, “I think it’s important never to look a gift horse in the mouth and never to overlook your talents. I really don’t consider whether it’s dramatic or comedic. It’s like a child-like fascination. How different can I look? What characters can come out of this at the end of it all? You really don’t know when you start, but you take the chance and take the shot in doing it. If you go full bore into it with faith, it always ends up surprising you. It’s really kind of a feeling of giving birth to something.”
And whether that something is this month’s thriller The Number 23 (in which he plays both a likeable family man and a noir-ish detective with equal aplomb) or his next project, voicing the elephant lead in an animated version of Dr. Seuss’ classic Horton Hears a Who, Carrey seems determined to love each and every one of his creative offspring with everything he’s got.
“I don’t want to get uppity,” he says with his trademark hearty laugh. “The danger for me is to start choosing all my parts because they’re good for an Oscar. I like to be funny. I never decided at one point, ‘OK, I’m going to be a serious actor now.’ I want to do everything I can—many different characters and pictures. I like to get down and dirty and do comedy. It’s a way of throwing the hounds off the trail again and just having some fun.”
Truth is, despite the $20 million paydays and the adoration of millions, fun is something that Carrey’s life off-screen has often seemed to lack. From his teenage homelessness and a messy divorce from his first wife to highly publicized relationships (and subsequent breakups) with co-stars Lauren Holly and Renée Zellweger and a recent period in which he acknowledged taking anti-depressants, the series of unfortunate events that make up Carrey’s personal life are enough to make the comedy superstar seem… well, almost normal.
“I’ve had a couple [of setbacks] here and there,” he admits with a half-smile, “but for the most part it has just been a pretty amazing ride. To me, it’s a matter of staying in a place and realizing what everything is really worth. I know we try to mythologize every thing in Hollywood, so everything is blown out of proportion. But as far as I am concerned, I make movies that make people feel good for two hours. That’s my thing in life, and I’m okay with that.”
And what of the fame and adulation he’s been working so diligently for since the age of 17? Was the journey worth the effort, and the cost one must pay when cameras track your every move á la Truman Burbank? Despite the drawbacks of worldwide celebrity, Carrey seems to think so.
“People need their dreams,” he insists earnestly. “That’s why it’s not good for me to complain too much about the things that are negative in my life. If I complain about what a bummer it is to go to the beach and get recognized, it’s something people don’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s a pain, frankly, but I’m the luckiest guy in the world and I know it. I get a lot of people who want to love me. Some days I don’t love myself. Some days I just want to be the smallest speck in the universe instead of the biggest. But my job is to take people away from [the reality of] life, or make them identify with it, and I love what I do.”