What’s up with Jim Carrey?

You may, or may not, be planning on seeing the third film in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise when it is released this Christmas, but whether or not your taste for CGI pugnacious animals encompasses this latest cash-in for the Nintendo character, the presence of Jim Carrey should provide some distraction. Carrey is playing the villainous Dr. Robotnik for the third time, and has been offering some amusingly candid comments in interviews about his decision to return to the role. He announced that he came back to this film’s universe for two reasons, “first of all, I get to play a genius, which is a bit of a stretch” and “I bought a lot of stuff, and I need the money, frankly.”  

Many actors have taken on similarly demeaning roles, especially in the new glut of superhero and comic-book content, and few have been quite so candid about their financial reasons for their decisions. Yet Carrey, now sixty-two, is one of the more unusual actors in Hollywood. Since he broke through in 1994 with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, he initially had a Robin Williams-esque trajectory, in which he moved from full-on comic roles as Ace Ventura and the imbecilic Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber to acclaimed dramatic parts in the much-loved likes of The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and, especially, Man on the Moon, in which Carrey did not so much embody the late comedian Andy Kaufman as disappear into his persona and soul onscreen, to both entertaining and disturbing effect.  

Audiences may have expected, as with Williams, that Carrey would soon move into elder statesman territory, and that Oscars and other awards would subsequently follow. Certainly, his fine, subtle work in Eternal Sunshine deserved greater recognition from the Academy than it received, and his astonishingly versatile performance as the conman Steven Jay Russell in the black comedy I Love You Philip Morris remains a career highpoint. Just as the commercially unsuccessful but oddly fascinating The Cable Guy indicated that Carrey’s unique style of humor is most effective when the darkness is allowed free rein, his performance as Russell — a closeted homosexual who becomes a serial prison escapee — was both hilarious and chilling, suggesting that he was releasing something primal on screen.  

Yet since then, Carrey’s career has taken a dive. His semi-autobiographical Showtime series Kidding aside, you would struggle to find any particularly interesting or challenging work on his résumé since I Love You Philip Morris, and Carrey has been relatively open about his lack of interest in acting, preferring a career in painting instead. He released a brief documentary I Needed Color in 2017, which led some to wonder if this was some kind of elaborate performance art spoof, but apparently his interest in painting is deeply held and sincere. 

Instead, he has explored other, more esoteric territory when it comes to blurring the boundaries between Jim Carrey the performer and Jim Carrey the “real’ person. The documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond delved into the extent of his preparations to play Kaufman, and suggested that, if anything, the actor had gone so far into the Method that while Kaufman’s friends and family were delighted to be reunited with the late comedian once again, those around Carrey were mystified as to where he had disappeared to. And a semi-autobiographical 2020 novel, Memoirs and Misinformation, which he co-wrote with Dana Vachon, played around with ideas of the self, celebrity and split personae. It attracted warm, if faintly bemused, reviews, and seemed to suggest that Carrey was making peace with being one of the more unusual figures in contemporary Hollywood.  

His lucrative, if artistically unfulfilling, commitments to Sonic the Hedgehog might, therefore, be viewed as some strange piece of metatextual art, the sort of thing that Kaufman might have done if he had lived. Alternatively, actors need to make a living, and an undemanding role in a special effects-driven blockbuster will allow him the freedom to pursue other, more interesting projects in the future, or simply to retire. Yet it’s hard not to feel that, now that Carrey has shown the world how interesting an actor he can be, he has retreated deep into an unchallenging comfort zone. Let us hope that something sufficiently interesting emerges in the near future, so that he can extricate himself from it.