Jim Carrey's Wild Ride

Jim Carrey is prowling around a hotel suite in Beverly Hills, talking unhappily about success. Sure, success means having a sleek black Lexus, and firstclass air travel and waiting limos at the airport and a new home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. But success—or at least his driving ambition—also means personal turmoil. Carrey is divorcing his wife, actress Melissa Womer, after an eight-year marriage. "It's so clichéd," he says of his marital breakup. "But there have to be reasons for clichés." He pauses and sinks into a chair. "The life check has arrived. It's a payment for good times." He shakes his head. "It's not rewarding to live with me. I'm a hard guy to live with. I'm like a caged animal. I'm up all night walking around the living room. It's hard for me to come down from what I do. It's like being an astronaut. You're on the moon all day and then at night you go home and have to take out the garbage."

Friendly, funny (of course), shrewd and surprisingly self-analytical and serious, Carrey prowls once more around the hotel room, trying to cope with the pressures and craziness of suddenly turning into a media hotshot and movie star who earns $7 million a film.

He's annoyed, at the age of 32, to be called an overnight star. But only last year he was relatively unknown, a wacky, rubber-limbed comic virtuoso who was the token white boy on In Living Color, the Fox TV comedy revue. Carrey received only $350,000 for his first big movie, the unexpected hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and an additional $100,000 for The Mask, which opened successfully this past summer. But for his next comedy, Dumb and Dumber ("Guess which part I play," he says), he's receiving $7 million.

"I had casting approval on that one," he says. "The picture is about two stupid guys who become friends. I met Jeff Daniels and we had immediate rapport. So I fought for him. But it wasn't what the marketing geniuses had in mind. They wanted someone with an MTV profile, whatever that means." (It means that Jeff Daniels is not Brad Pitt or Jason Priestley.) But what Jim Carrey wants, he now gets. Jeff Daniels got the role.

Immediately after Dumb, Carrey is set to receive $5 million for his role as the Riddler in Batman Forever. ("Tommy Lee Jones is in that one," Carrey says, "and he scares the hell out of me.") And then there are possible sequels to Ace Ventura and The Mask. Carrey has joked that he was thinking of changing his name to "Ka-ching!—the sound of a cash register."

Certainly his fantasies about making tons of money and turning into a star have been fulfilled. But success also keeps exacting its price. Carrey must struggle to spend several days a week with his seven-year-old daughter, for example. Nonetheless, the comedian insists he is battling to keep his life in perspective and not allow his agents, managers and lawyers to overwhelm him. (He is currently in a relationship with Lauren Holly, his co-star in Dumb and Dumber.)

"For years I used to drive up to Mulholland Drive every night and look at the city and imagine myself with all this money and being sought after," he says. "It's not the money or the houses. That's really not it. What success means is being at the top of my game. That's what I want. What I'm still looking for."

(But money is hardly unimportant. Only four years ago, while sitting alone atop Mulholland Drive, Carrey wrote a fantasy check to himself for $10 million, dated Thanksgiving 1995. He underestimated his worth.)

Seated in his hotel room, Carrey sighs. His mouth suddenly twists into a goofy grin, his eyes widen, his chin drops and his rubbery face turns maniacal. "It is weird," he says, speaking slowly and then rapidly. "Very, very weird. My life is still a string of embarrassments. I go to premieres and try to make a cool exit and the limo driver locks his keys in the car and it's running and he's trying to pick the lock while I'm standing there and the theater is emptying out. Real cool."

No one would accuse Carrey of being a cool guy. Far from it. The Canadian-born performer isn't the hottest new comedian in the movie business because of his hip style. Think of him as the son of Jerry Lewis or the kid brother of Robin Williams. Think of him as a kind of weird, skinny, multi-jointed guy who glides into manic imitations of Clint Eastwood, Geraldo Rivera and, of all people, Kevin Bacon (he tapes his nose to his forehead).

Think of him as a contortionist whose first film success, Ace Ventura, was marked by the genuinely nutty scene in which he bent over and made it appear that he was talking through his pants.

"Until Ace Ventura," he says, "no actor had considered talking through his ass."

Carrey calls his style, quite accurately, "Fred Astaire on acid."

"There is no control," he says, speaking, perhaps, both of his own inner life and his comedic style. "People who say they're in control are full of it."

Carrey's hunger for success is rooted, most certainly, in a hardscrabble childhood outside Toronto in an offbeat family that nurtured him. His father, Percy, was a struggling professional musician. "A sax and clarinet player," Carrey says. "It was like a Hollywood script. He sold his sax to get my sister out of the hospital when she was born. And he never went back to music."

Carrey's father became an accountant and a janitor. At one point nearly the entire family—the comedian is the youngest of four children—worked as janitors. "It made me mad," he says. "Seeing my dad do that kind of work just tore me up.'"The family plunged into poverty, living for a while in a Volkswagen camper and tents. His father lost his job at age 51 and was unable to find work. "That made me realize that there's no such thing as security." His father's troubles at the hands of bosses outraged Carrey—and still do. His mother, Kathleen, was constantly bedridden with illnesses and died several years ago. "When she was sick I used to go into the bedroom and do praying-mantis impressions," says Carrey, who is still close to his father and siblings.

"We were the wildest family," Carrey says. Every Sunday, he recalls, there would be a cherry cheesecake fight at the table. Often at dinner, the kids smeared one another with butter. There were lots of jokes and laughter despite the family's poverty.

From the third grade on, Carrey began putting on shows for the family, imitating neighbors as well as television stars and making weird faces, all after practicing for hours in front of a mirror and talking to himself. "I would do all these shows in the basement that they thought were hilarious," he recalls. "I did it for my parents because someday I was going to make their lives happy and beautiful." He laughs.

What drove Carrey into comedy? The question seemed to puzzle him. "It was necessary," he says quietly. "I never wanted to do anything else. Despite everything, my father was a funny guy. And I looked at comedians on television, people like Dick Van Dyke, and I said to myself, 'I want to be just like that.' The physical stuff Van Dyke did was phenomenal.

"It's weird," says Carrey. "I can't imagine what it's like not to know what you want to do. People come out of college not knowing. It's weird. I can't imagine that. It must be a horrible feeling. I knew what I wanted from the time I was a little kid."

At 15, his father helped him write a comedy routine and took him to Toronto's hip Yuk Yuks comedy club. "I got booed off the stage," Carrey says. "I was dressed in a polyester suit that my mom told me would be a good idea. But it didn't go over so well in the hip underground world. I went back two years later. I messed up my hair. No polyester. It was fine."

He hung around Toronto's comedy clubs, perfecting his imitations and loose physical style. Carrey also decided that his yearning to please his family was not only excessive but inhibiting. "At some point I realized it wasn't up to me to make their lives beautiful," he says. "That was leading me nowhere. I started to do it for myself. Weird things. Don't try to please the crowd, shock them. If it's not funny, call it performance art." Carrey laughs. "That's when everything started happening."

At 19, Carrey went to Los Angeles to try the clubs there. He lived in cheap motel rooms on Sunset Boulevard. "It was like a complete other world," he recalls. "I watched the hookers walk up and down. It was like I had walked into some bizarre X-rated movie. It freaked me out."

Carrey found work relatively quickly, mostly club dates in L.A. and Las Vegas in which he focused on imitations of stars and offbeat characters. But the work took its toll.

As he began earning money to support his parents back in Canada, Carrey's expansive comedy style narrowed. Club owners and audiences demanded a mainstream comedian—and Carrey accommodated them. He was moderately successful, a rising comedian on the club circuit, but trapped in a mainstream act that he loathed. Carrey says he became fearful that he would wind up as a slick nightclub performer in Las Vegas. The fear started to paralyze him. He suffered from depression.

Television appalled him. "Most of it is so insulting, so horrifying," he says. "I didn't want to be part of anybody's sitcom. They're so terrible. I remember going to auditions and once they asked me what my likes and dislikes were on television. And I said that my dislike was television. And that's probably not a good thing to say in a TV audition."

Finally he quit comedy for a while. Seized with personal doubt, Carrey visited psychics, psychologists and colonic therapists ("Very strange"). He read self-help books. Upon returning to the L.A. comedy scene a few years later, he adopted the free-form, even bizarre, style that's evident now. In some club appearances Carrey appeared naked onstage except for a strategically placed sock. In other appearances he played a cockroach. His terror of turning into a slick Las Vegas comedian vanished. "A great comedian is someone who takes chances, great risks," he says.

Television audiences began noticing him when he was cast as the crazy white boy on In Living Color. "I went into it sink or swim," he says. "I had never played characters before. I got all kinds of great advice from people, like, 'This is kind of stupid' and 'Why do you want to be the token white guy?' and all that stuff. It fueled my desire to stand out. Desperation drove me, made all these wild things come out."

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The wild things included creating such notable characters as Vera de Milo, the steroid-crazed female bodybuilder, and Fire Marshal Bill, a charred, grotesquely disfigured fireman (that's right). Carrey, a semilapsed Catholic, acknowledges that he had some feelings of guilt about the fireman and says that following his first performance as Bill he went home and felt as if he were going to hell. Soon the guilt vanished, but he believes that "if somebody else wrote it, I would probably think it was disgusting."

His shtick of talking through the seat of his pants developed when Carrey was having an argument during rehearsals with Keenan Ivory Wayans, the show's creator. Carrey turned around, bent over and conducted a read-through of a scene that way.

It was the improbable success of Ace Ventura that made Carrey a bankable star. The movie, about a private eye hunting for the kidnapped mascot of the Miami Dolphins, had been turned down by just about every known comedian in town. Carrey says he didn't care for the script too much either, but he was given a free hand to rewrite the movie. Carrey did so with a vengeance, turning the movie into a physically nutty one-man show that appealed to young kids as well as to the teenage and twenty-something crowds that are Hollywood's prime audiences.

The film's instant success—it grossed an unexpected $12 million in its first weekend—amazed Carrey and startled Hollywood. It had been years since a comedian had instantly reached stardom in one film. Carrey attributed the film's success, in part, to good timing. "When the film came out everything else was so serious," he explains. "You had Schindler's List and Philadelphia. People needed a laugh." Carrey probably underestimates his own pull at the box office.

It was Damon Wayans, one of Carrey's buddies on In Living Color, who offered an observation about Carrey that the comedian still thinks about. "Damon came backstage after I did something really weird and said, 'Hey, man, you are one of the angriest people that I have ever seen.'"

Carrey laughs at the recollection. "I said, 'Yeah, I guess I've got that going for me. That's how I deal with it.'"

Carrey turns serious. His face seems serene; his hands have stopped moving. "There's an edge, a danger to what I do," he says. "And an anger. I do this ridiculous stuff that's based on anger and anxiety. Even the guys I play in the movies, nice guys, put their foot down. They're angry guys. People are attracted to that, identify with it."

The comedian's personal demons seem to hover just beneath the surface. "My focus is to forget the pain of life," he says quietly. "Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh."