| Jim Carrey is many things, but subtle is not one of them. For his latest film, the children’s fantasy adventure Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Carrey plays Count Olaf. Olaf gains custody of the Boudelaire children when their parents mysteriously die, but Olaf just wants to get his hands on the kids’ inheritance. Since Olaf is a failed actor, his antagonism towards the youths takes on extreme theatrical proportions.
“Vocally I was trying to get a little bit of an Orson Welles-ian kind of thing going on with a sprinkle of Count Chocula,” Carrey said. “As far as the character goes, I was trying to fashion him after kind of like a bird of prey, the type of bird that waits on the beach until the nest is unguarded, and then steals the eggs. He’s that guy. Physically, I wanted to be like the books, like the illustrations from the books that kids are used to, he turned out looking like my dad actually, which is really freaky. My family is constantly like, ‘Man, dude, we’re seeing pictures, what are you doing? What are you doing, man?’”
But Carrey has always liked to immerse himself in his roles. “The make up in a movie like this is such a great odyssey because, first of all they’re shaving my head off and you don’t know what you’re going to get. I did it for Man on the Moon, and it just is never comfortable to do for no good reason. And I had big, long and curly fingernails that I had to walk around with and stuff like that, and I looked really freaky. And it’s okay, because I have a license to do that. It’s kind of cool. I love transforming. It’s like Christmas morning to me. You get into the make-up trailer and you start playing around with things, and throwing pieces together, at one point we had a Don King wig on backwards, strapped to the back of my head, and I look like a frigging hood ornament from a Chevy, it was weird. But we experimented, we came up with 30 different characters that didn’t get into the movie. The whole process is exciting. It’s such a fun thing to masquerade, period. It’s just a fun thing anyway.”
Count Olaf is the type of crazy loon Carrey played in many of his first movies - Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber. Lately, Carrey has taken on some more intimate roles, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Majestic. Yet the comedian refuses to reveal where his true personality lies.
“I think the two me’s are definitely meeting in the middle in some respects. 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 that people rarely get to do, the diversity of roles that I’m doing, so I feel incredibly lucky. That being said, it also is happening because I want it, and because I know that I have that side of myself to express, and it’s all part of it. Hopefully it all comes together in a giant big chocolate sundae with a cherry on it. It will be a well-rounded meal soon. I will never ever reveal my secret. Everybody seems to be really fascinated about who I really am, or maybe they’re just saying that. I don’t know how to define myself and hopefully I will never find out. I just want to play every part as they come and do it in a really original way.”
While audiences laugh at Carrey’s physical antics, Carrey himself takes pleasure in less traditional forms of humor. “I laugh at mistakes. I laugh when people screw up basically. That’s my big thing because I can kind of see a joke coming a mile away. So sitcoms to me, I’d sit there and go, ‘Der, der, der…’ and one plus two is… and all that stuff a lot of times. The things that really get me laughing are ridiculous things, when people make mistakes, when people fall off their horse. You know what’s really funny to me? Ego is funny to me. That’s part of the reason why I did this movie. I’m born on the same day as Muhammed Ali. I get his sense of humor. I get that ‘I am the greatest’ that kind of thing. He was so jerking people completely. He was completely on another level.”
The role of Count Olaf allowed Carrey the opportunity to make fun of that kind of ego. “I love making fun of actors. I love making fun of the process that puts us in the place of total self-consciousness. There was some talk at the beginning of the movie, executives were like, ‘Well, maybe we should make his hair a little fuller, a little more younger, da da da da, like that’ and I said, ‘No, no. This guy’s got to be past it and very insecure about his hairline.’ I was like, ‘Push it back, man. Push it back.’
At a time when entertainers sometimes take on political positions, Carrey knows where his art belongs. “[Humor] can make it a little bit more palatable I think. 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. I do get into that headspace sometimes, I don’t really want to like just kind of walk through the world but not do anything with this gift, whatever it is, and so for me 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.”
See Carrey in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events starting Friday, December 17. |
