(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Gage Skidmore)
Many comedians have been portrayed as tortured geniuses cursed with equal flashes of brilliance and madness, and it wouldn’t be unfair to lump Jim Carrey into that category when he’s shown plenty of eccentricities away from the signature rubber-faced schtick that made him a superstar.
What can’t be argued is that he was the biggest and highest-paid stars in Hollywood in the 1990s, a feat that’s even more remarkable when he was relatively unknown before Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber were released within a ten-month span and launched him into the stratosphere.
Since then, his career has endured some ups and downs, to the point that his public persona has become an endless source of fascination. Whether it’s his existential approach to fame and fortune, the nonsequiturs that have become increasingly common when he’s speaking in public, or the conspiracy theorists who are adamant he’s been talking about Hollywood’s ties to the Illuminati in the open for years, Carrey seems like a bit of a strange guy.
Was it Man on the Moon that pushed him over the edge? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. Carrey went full method for the first time in his career, which profoundly affected him on a personal level. He almost lost himself completely to Andy Kaufman, and his antics made headlines for a lot of the wrong reasons when the film itself wasn’t really anything to write home about.
Throughout production, he wasn’t Jim, he was Andy. Unfortunately, that meant he would behave like his alter-ego would, leading to one incident where he held Danny DeVito captive. The diminutive actor, who played George Shapiro in Miloš Forman’s biopic, was left powerless as the rest of the production crew stood around waiting for him to be freed.
It was even a double-pronged method assault, with Carrey playing Kaufman, who was playing Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton. “Danny couldn’t get onto the set because Tony found the key, locked Danny inside Danny’s trailer, backed up a car against the door, then took the key to the car and threw it into the Los Angeles River,” screenwriter Scott Alexander shared.
“So now, Danny DeVito can’t get out of the trailer to get onto the set, so they can’t film, and Tony thinks it’s really funny,” he continued. “Miloš has a good sense of humour, but now we’ve got to find a tow truck while Danny’s banging on the window. It was trying peoples’ patience. It was bananas.”
Basically, he was so immersed in his character that Carrey – who, remember, was embodying not only Kaufman but embodying Kaufman embodying his own Clifton persona that he created as a bit – decided that the latter thought it would be funny if he were to pull one of his classic pranks on DeVito, without a care in the world for the co-star he was holding prisoner or the movie he was holding up while everyone waited for him to be excised from his predicament.
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