The co-star who sent Jim Carrey to a higher plane of existence: “I was definitely on, I was on it”
Any time anyone can get Jim Carrey off his own particular plane of existence, it should make headline news. The actor is notorious for taking a script and running with it like a puppy with your favourite pair of shoes, and that can be exhausting for everyone. In most cases, it’s best to just put him in a movie that revolves around him and let him do his own thing because there really is no one who can work on his wavelength.
In one film, however, Carrey found an actor who was not his match, per se, but something much greater – a performer who pulled him out of his lane and dropped him into completely new territory. It’s hard to imagine that this is possible. For decades, Carrey has been doing his own thing with extreme vigour. Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber are showcases for the comedian in the way that a stage and a microphone are showcases for stand-ups. Without him, those films would be akin to inert objects.
When Carrey turned his energies to Brad Silberling’s 2004 adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s children’s book A Series of Unfortunate Events, he was awoken from his comedic trance by one of the greatest actors of all time: Meryl Streep. The film could easily have been another Carrey vehicle. In it, he plays Count Olaf, an actor and a swindler who sees dollar signs when he adopts three orphans with a huge fortune.
Carrey dons many disguises in the film, giving him ample opportunity to steamroll his co-stars, but Streep is difficult to steamroll even in her most restrained performances. She plays Aunt Josephine in the movie, the orphans’ relative and temporary guardian who is obsessed with grammatical correctness and suffers from OCD. Working opposite Streep, Carrey hit a new level of performing that he never knew he could reach.
“I’m not sure what she was doing, but I was definitely on, I was on it. I was on it,” he said in an interview with RadioFree. “And I could feel it.”
Like many actors who work with the multi-time Oscar winner, Carrey was struck by how approachable and self-deprecating Streep was. “The first time I met Meryl, it was like jazz,” he said, adding, “It’s like a watermark in any actor’s career to work with Meryl Streep. And she’s really nice and supportive. What other cliche actor thing can I say? I mean, I feel sorry for her because she’s getting so many compliments, and she’s always like, ‘Oh my gosh, oh no. I’m just working.’ She’s very humble about it, just really fun to play with.”
A Series of Unfortunate Events wasn’t the pinnacle of either actor’s career, and regardless of how Carrey felt while performing his scenes, his version of jazz in the film is more akin to a jazz solo than a jam, but it was clearly an important moment in his career. If his experience working opposite one of the greatest dramatic actors of all time had anything to do with his decision to take on another dramatic role in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless, we can all thank Streep, yet again, for her unparalleled contributions to cinema.
