“It was terrible! It didn’t work!”: Jim Carrey’s greatest performance was guaranteed to fail
It might sound oxymoronic to say that an actor’s greatest performance was destined to end in nothing but failure, but that doesn’t make it any less true that it happened to Jim Carrey.
Having proven his chops several times over with standout turns in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although his needlessly dedicated method acting in Man on the Moon continues to divide opinion, we can all agree that the rubber-faced Canadian is a phenomenal dramatic actor.
Well, so long as he has the right material, since other straight-laced outings in The Number 23 and Dark Crimes were shite, but the most subversive work of his career came in The Cable Guy, a movie that didn’t stand a chance of succeeding, regardless of the sum of its parts.
For one thing, becoming the first actor to secure a $20million paycheque for a starring role guaranteed that the knives would be out, sharpened, and ready to slice and dice, no matter how the dark comedy fared. It was a watershed moment for Hollywood, and not necessarily in a good way, and as the first of his kind, Carrey’s status as the industry’s eight-figure guinea pig placed him in an unwinnable position.
Not that the studio helped, though. The marketing deliberately misled casual audiences into believing they’d be getting something along the same lines as Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber, with the trailers and promos focusing on the leading man’s usual schtick, intentionally obfuscating that The Cable Guy was actually pretty fucked up.
Then there was the release date, with a mid-June debut once again creating the false impression that Ben Stiller’s unnerving descent into madness and obsession was a crowd-pleaser. It opened at number one, yes, but once everyone discovered what the movie actually was, those takings swiftly tapered off.
When producer Judd Apatow showed ten minutes of footage to the producer and talent agent Bernie Brillstein, he was aghast. “He’s like, ‘Nooo! Is he going to talk like that the whole movie?'” the ‘Frat Pack’ patriarch recalled. “I said, ‘It’s like the movie Neighbours with Belushi and Aykroyd, then Bernie goes, ‘I know! I produced that movie! It was terrible! It didn’t work!'”
Co-star Matthew Broderick sympathised with Carrey, with that $20m payday piling on the pressure, since “it hadn’t been that long since he was relatively unknown, and suddenly he’s the highest-paid, you gotta be the greatest genius ever, every minute,” but that was far from the only factor that conspired to set The Cable Guy, and its star’s egregiously overlooked performance, as a disaster waiting to happen.
30 years on, and the film is a stone-cold cult favourite that’s finally been getting the flowers it deserved the first time around, and it’s a role that Carrey continues to cherish more than most. That said, based on how it was treated from the outside and the way it was mis-sold ahead of release, there wasn’t much chance it would be anything but a bust the first time around.
