Did Jim Carrey’s ‘SNL’ rejection spark his impressive career?
Saturday Night Live has long been viewed as a proving ground for the next generation of comedy superstars, but Jim Carrey is just one of many names to have been rejected by the long-running sketch show before finding fame eventually.
Jennifer Coolidge, Stephen Colbert, Geena Davis, Donald Glover, John Goodman, Andy Kaufman, Kevin Hart, Adam McKay, Jordan Peele, and Aubrey Plaza are among the others to have unsuccessfully auditioned for SNL, but Carrey is the only one of that number who ended up becoming the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.
In fact, Carrey was rejected no less than three times, with creator Lorne Michaels telling Vanity Fair that maybe he wouldn’t have passed over the rubber-faced funnyman had he been in the room: “I wasn’t at the Jim Carrey audition,” he said, “but somebody who was there said, ‘I don’t think Lorne would like it,’ and they were probably wrong, but it doesn’t matter.”
Had he been hired after his first audition in 1980, Carrey would have become the youngest-ever cast member at the age of only 18. However, that was the exact same year Eddie Murphy would make the cut to claim the record for himself at 19, and he didn’t do too badly for himself in the long run, either.
After his third and final rejection in 1986, Carrey abandoned his dreams of SNL stardom to focus on his stand-up career – securing small movie roles along the way – before he was struck by the sudden realisation that he was in danger of pigeonholing himself as an impressionist and nothing more.
Speaking to Roger Ebert, Carrey explained the lightbulb that went off in his head: “I did impressions at the beginning, but I got to the point where I saw where I realised you gotta be an original. You gotta be something different.” Trying his hand at fresh material without relying on ribbing famous faces for an easy laugh, adding new elements to his comedic repertoire eventually led to his big break.
The year after debuting as one of In Living Color‘s core cast members in 1990 – a position he’d hold for the entirety of its five-season run – Carrey’s first televised special Un-Natural Act premiered. Before the Wayans family’s sketch series had even gone off the air, the actor had already started one of the most meteoric rises in modern cinema history.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber were all released between February and December of 1994, with Carrey taking top billing in each. Instantly quotable and massively successful, the trio combined to earn more than $700 million at the global box office to turn the leading man from a relatively unknown small-screen comic to one of the biggest stars in the business in less than a year.
He immediately followed that up with the blockbuster superhero sequel Batman Returns, and by the time he’d reached only his fifth leading role in a major motion picture, his $20m salary for The Cable Guy had anointed him as the top-earning actor in all of Tinseltown.
Being rejected by SNL may have been the best thing to happen to Carrey in retrospect. It allowed him the time to refine his material and cultivate his distinctive style of over-enunciated delivery and facial gymnastics, even if the ten-year gap between his first rejection and the premiere of In Living Color was filled with its fair share of ups, downs, and obstacles.
By the time Carrey returned to host SNL for the first time a decade after his third and final rejection, it was as an A-list megastar and the recipient of the biggest paycheque that any actor had ever received for a single movie, something that may never have happened if he was welcomed aboard the ensemble, to begin with.
