The Jim Carrey role Frank Darabont likened to “brain surgery”
While we will forever know Jim Carrey as a master of the comic acting craft, it’s fair to say that he has surprised us all on a handful of impressive occasions through which he’s proven his dramatic and humourous qualities. Sure, the Canadian movie icon has split everyone’s side in one way or another, but that doesn’t mean that being funny is the only string to his professional bow.
Looking back across Carrey’s time in the spotlight, we find his brilliant performances in the likes of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, The Cable Guy, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty, the likes of which saw Carrey deliver his unique brand of over-the-top slapstick comedy in a wide range of roles.
However, with 1998’s The Truman Show and 1999’s Man on the Moon, Carrey showed that there was another, more dramatic side to him, although these roles also contained elements of comedy. In 2004, though, Carrey went the full distance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and showed the world that he could make them laugh as well as cry.
A few years before his effort in Michael Gondry’s science fiction romantic drama, though, Carrey had tried his hand in another film that required him to put his comic leanings to one side. In 2001, in Frank Darabont’s The Majestic, Carrey played Peter Appleton, a young 1950s Hollywood screenwriter suspected of being a communist. After a road accident, he suffers amnesia and is taken in by the residents of a small town who mistake him for a local MIA World War II soldier.
Darabont had just come off the back of making The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and in an interview with the BBC, he once spoke of how Carrey had to change up his acting style big time. “It’s more structured,” the director admitted. “In his comedic films, there’s a lot more ad-libbing. In this, we stuck quite firmly to the text. It’s more in the theatrical tradition. With Jim, this movie was more like brain surgery than he had ever done before.”
Thankfully, though Darabont said that Carrey was “very committed to his craft” and was happy “to do a lot of takes” in order to get his performance right. Later, Carrey had admitted to feeling somewhat “uncomfortable” with the dramatic role, seeing as he had been used to giving comedic efforts at the time, and that he had to develop a level of trust with Darabont.
“It was very confronting, and I was very uncomfortable with it a lot of the time,” Carrey had once told Film Threat. “I come from a world where you know basically you’re not doing anything unless you’re risking your life on the set, and this was more about ‘how does this person make you feel?'” Thankfully, Darabont was on hand to help Carrey navigate the role of Peter Appleton and steer him in the right direction when he had leant into his comedic history a little too much.
Darabont knew that Carrey was in the middle of “brain surgery”, i.e. changing his entire way of thinking about acting, so he had some crucial advice for his actor. “Be who you are sitting here right now, let the camera come in, and don’t try to make anything happen,” Darabont told Carrey, according to the actor. “Just be who you are and let the audience decide what to think of it.'”
