“It’s a jinx”: the movie Jim Carrey called his ‘Citizen Kane’ and the unfortunate premonition that came true
There’s only one Citizen Kane, and there’ll only ever be one Citizen Kane, but Jim Carrey was confident that he was on the right path to making one of his own, until he shot himself in the foot.
Admittedly, that last part is up for debate, since it depends on whether or not you believe in curses or coincidence. The actor noted that revealing too much ahead of time could jinx his dream, and because it didn’t happen, who’s to say there wasn’t otherworldly interference afoot?
For the non-believers, most of the blame can be laid at the feet of studio politics and the ‘twin films’ phenomenon, but where’s the fun in that? On the other hand, it’s a little cruel to blame Carrey and his big mouth for torpedoing a picture that would have almost definitely earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’, if not a win.
He should have been on the shortlist for The Truman Show, but he wasn’t, and the rest of Carrey’s straight-faced performances haven’t managed to reach the same level, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind excluded. However, playing Howard Hughes in a Christopher Nolan movie? That’s another story.
It’s the greatest film that the Dark Knight trilogy and Oppenheimer maestro never made, by quite some distance, and it’s also the greatest film that Carrey never made, too, unless there’s anyone out there left eternally dismayed that there wasn’t a third Ace Ventura, a sequel to The Cable Guy, or Tim Burton’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
When pressed for a status update in 2001, Carrey had his most unfortunate premonition. “Well, Howard Hughes is somebody I’m interested in,” he explained. “We’re not very far along on that, so I can’t really speak much about it very much because it’s a jinx.” How right he was, with Martin Scorsese scuttling his and Nolan’s biopic when The Aviator made it to the starting line first.
It was the role of a lifetime, and he knew it, with Carrey feeling a certain kinship with the eccentric magnate. “In certain ways, I probably am him,” he conceded, and while you can snicker all you want, one of the actor’s driving forces was to discover more about Hughes’ internal life, or as he put it, “I want to find out what his hole was.”
“It’s Citizen Kane, to me, with characters,” the rubber-faced Canadian elucidated. “It’s what they were missing, what are they trying to fill up with their behaviour. It’s ‘rosebud’. Everyone is trying to find ‘rosebud’, the thing they are missing, but it’s in the fire. You have to let it go. It’s amazing.”
Sadly, Carrey never got to find his rosebud, and while The Aviator was a great biopic that won a couple of Oscars, the combination of the star playing the part of a lifetime with Nolan behind the camera stood every chance of being superior to what Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio cooked up.
