“The script needed a lot of work”: the comedy classic Jim Carrey surprisingly helped create
Any high-profile studio comedy would be desperate to have Jim Carrey as its focal point in the 1990s, with the rubber-faced superstar reigning as one of Hollywood’s leading lights at the peak of his powers when almost everything he touched had a habit of turning to gold.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and its sequel When Nature Calls, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Batman Forever, and Liar Liar were all released within the space of three years. Every single one of them was a runaway box office hit, and they each allowed the actor to indulge his signature style of slapstick.
One of the only missteps during that golden period was The Cable Guy, but even then, Carrey made history as the first performer to ever land a $20million paycheque for a single role. The deranged black comedy has gone on to take its well-deserved place as a cult classic that didn’t get the love it deserved the first time around because it was the exact opposite of what everyone was expecting.
The Cable Guy marked the second feature from director Ben Stiller after 1994’s Reality Bites, and he would later prove to be a huge beneficiary of a project Carrey was initially spearheading alongside Steven Spielberg before it was refitted into the basis for a trilogy that would comfortably clear a billion dollars at the box office.
When a remake of Greg Glienna’s 1992 comedy Meet the Parents was first announced, Stiller was nowhere near it. Instead, Carrey had envisioned the update as being the perfect conduit for his mugging and pratfalling, with Spielberg circling the director’s chair to add another injection of A-list talent.
However, when the stars failed to align and scheduling conflicts reared their head, Jay Roach ended up wielding the megaphone with Stiller set as Greg Focker. It was Carrey who’d come up with the protagonist’s name, but once he was out of the picture, the newly-installed creative team set about refitting it from a one-man showcase into a two-hander, which led directly to Robert De Niro’s involvement.
As Stiller recalled to Entertainment Weekly, Meet the Parents wasn’t close to what he wanted it to be when he came on board. “The script needed a lot of work,” he admitted. “There was all this broad stuff written for Jim Carrey. We did an initial readthrough, and even though we’d all kind of committed, it could not have happened.”
Carrey didn’t have any issues with the end result anyway, despite confirming that “Meet the Parents was something I was developing with Steven Spielberg” and that he’d “actually created the Fockers in a creative meeting.” At least there was no bad blood between The Cable Guy collaborators, with the former star conceding, “It was perfect that Ben Stiller did it.”
