“He wasn’t famous enough”: the iconic role Jim Carrey wasn’t allowed to play
Having been a familiar face since the late 1980s and a household name since 1994, it’s been a long time since Jim Carrey wasn’t famous enough for anything, especially the leading role in a movie.
Two years after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber gave him one of the greatest breakout years for any star in recent memory, The Cable Guy cemented him at the summit of the industry’s A-list by making him the industry’s first-ever $20million-per-picture player.
Ironically, in between those two points, which transformed Carrey from the white guy on In Living Color into a cinematic superstar, the film he was ruled out of the running for due to his lack of recognition and mainstream visibility was released, and it ended up changing the course of big-screen history forever.
At the time, Pixar’s Toy Story was far from a sure thing. The nascent animation studio had shown that computer-generated animation was the medium’s next great technological leap forward, but not everyone was convinced that using it to power an entire feature would be a nailed-on success.
Obviously, the dissenters were forced to eat their words when it conquered the box office and ushered in a new era for animated film, but it was far from smooth sailing. In what would become an increasingly common practice for Pixar, the production was beset by issues, rewrites, and temporary shutdowns, but since it was a completely unknown quantity, doom was being prognosticated in many quarters.
Director John Lasseter always envisioned Tom Hanks voicing Woody, and used voice recordings of Turner & Hooch combined with test footage to convince him that he was the right guy for the job, but finding the perfect Buzz Lightyear was a little trickier, with co-writer and disgraced filmmaker Joss Whedon revealing that the studio was insistent on securing a big name.
“We were still casting,” he recalled. “Disney put the kibosh on the person they wanted for Buzz Lightyear because he wasn’t famous enough, so we couldn’t use Jim Carrey.” By the time Toy Story was released, there were few actors as famous as he was, but that wasn’t the case when the movie was first announced.
Casting could only begin when the script was approved to head into production, which happened in January 1993, when Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg gave it the go-ahead. It would be over a year before Carrey’s back-to-back-to-back smash hits rocketed him to prominence, so it wasn’t wrong of the ‘Mouse House’ to say he wasn’t a big enough name.
That said, Toy Story probably dodged a bullet. It might have something to do with Tim Allen playing Buzz for the last 30 years, apart from the time Chris Evans took over and nobody cared, but it’s hard to imagine him as the stoic Space Ranger who refused to believe he was a toy, and it’s just as difficult to envision him fostering the same kind of dynamic with Hanks’ Woody that’s powered the entire franchise.
