The only actors Jim Carrey ever felt sorry for: “It was a very odd thing to do”
Having spent 30 years of his career swearing off sequels, Jim Carrey has made a complete pivot and now appears committed to spending the rest of it doing nothing but reprising the same role in perpetuity.
One of his earliest movie appearances came in a follow-up when he played Johnny Squares in Clint Eastwood’s fifth Dirty Harry flick, The Dead Pool, but he’d developed a distaste for franchise fare by the middle of the 1990s after Batman Forever and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls were released in quick succession.
For decades, the rule appeared to be that sequels to Carrey movies were fair game, except that Carrey was never in them. There’s a reason why nobody remembers that Ace Ventura Jr: Pet Detective exists, why Son of the Mask is roundly savaged as one of the worst films ever made, and why Evan Almighty became one of the biggest box office bombs in history.
The rubber-faced comedian was smart enough to realise those characters would never work again, but because the studio wanted to continue squeezing every last penny out of the brand, they happened anyway, and the results were suitably dire. It wasn’t until the early 2010s that Carrey overcame his anti-sequel sentiment, and even that wasn’t without its issues.
He completely disowned Kick-Ass 2 and refused to promote it, which came a year before the long-awaited Dumb and Dumber To arrived. To try and maximise its profits, unnecessary prequel When Harry Met Lloyd had landed with an apathetic thud in 2003, which left Carrey feeling sorry for the poor sods who had to try and step into the gurning shoes he and Jeff Daniels had left behind.
“The businessmen basically went, ‘Well, it’s not really him, is it? We can cast this with anybody,'” he lamented to the Los Angeles Times. “They were all talented people, but I’d hate to step into the shoes of an actor who’s made an iconic character. That’s a tough one. So I felt bad for them, but I also felt like it was a very odd thing to do.”
New Line Cinema made the mistake of thinking that it wasn’t Carrey and Daniels but the characters they played that made Dumb and Dumber such an enduring favourite, deciding that it was a bulletproof idea to hire Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson to do a pair of terrible impersonations. A shared Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Screen Couple’ was all they had to show for their efforts, and the fact the official sequel that got the original band back together was terrible only underlined how futile any efforts to recapture the magic would be.
Clearly putting his sequel bias to the side, the only movies Carrey has starred in since 2016 have been the three entries in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, making him virtually semi-retired at this point.
