The moment Jim Carrey met the “legend” Clint Eastwood
It would be fair to say that Jim Carrey and Clint Eastwood are just about as far apart as actors and perhaps as human beings as one can get. Eastwood is, of course, a legend of the western film genre, a serious man who has established himself as a master director as well as an acclaimed actor.
Carrey, on the other hand, is a hero of comedy. Known and loved for his early stand-up routines, impressions and slapstick form of humour, Carrey invariably became one of comedy’s all-time greats with a series of performances in some of the most notable and hilarious movies of the 1990s and 2000s.
However, despite their differences, the Unforgiven, Dirty Harry and Gran Torino star and the Dumb & Dumber, The Mask and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actor share one thing in common: they are both proven legends of Hollywood. Interestingly, they also share a link in the fact that it was Eastwood who served as a vital conduit to Carrey’s success in Tinseltown.
In a speech celebrating the career of Eastwood, Carrey had once noted, “Not many people know this, but Clint Eastwood was one of my first supporters in the business,” Carrey once said in a speech praising Eastwood. In fact, one of Carrey’s first film roles came in the 1988 Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, directed by Buddy Van Horn.
The final film in the franchise saw Carrey play a “crazed drug fiend rockstar named Johnny Squares”. The audition process had Carrey make a tape of himself singing a song by Alice Cooper, and Carrey being Carrey, he went in on his chance, going “completely nuts, tearing up the office and spitting into the camera,” although afterwards, he had begun to worry whether or not he had gone “too far”.
Thankfully, he soon met Eastwood, who was set to reprise his role as Harry Callahan in the movie, and who told him that he was really impressed by what Carrey had to offer the character of Johnny Squares.
Carrey noted, “He just said to me, ‘I loved that tape, and I showed it to all my friends.’”
Of course, Carrey was blown away by the impression he had made on the legendary actor and knew immediately that he wanted to do him proud in the proper production of the film. The actor continued, “The first day of shooting, I showed up with all these wild ideas. I said, ‘Hey, I have a ton of ideas that I want to try out, Mr. Eastwood, if you don’t mind.’”
Naturally, Carrey was expected the long-established Eastwood to be a bit hesitant of the new kid on the blood, but he saw something special in Carrey, the kind of talent that would eventually make him a huge Hollywood star, and he took one look at Carrey, then turned to the film’s producer and suggested that they let the young Canadian run with whatever he thought was suitable for the role.
“I was a tad over-prepared that day, but that was only because I was working with a legend, somebody whose movies I’d admired for years,” Carrey signed off on his thoughts about the moment he met Eastwood. The story is a tale of Hollywood legend; when two very different worlds collided, Eastwood showed his love for the most irreverent kind of comedy out there.
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