The one actor Christopher Nolan called perfect: “He just really is”
As one of the most prominent filmmakers in the industry, Christopher Nolan has had the opportunity to collaborate with A-listers for the better part of his career. From Christian Bale and Michael Caine to Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy, each has left a lasting impression on the director. Most recently, Cillian Murphy blew Nolan away with his portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer, elevating the 2023 biopic to a whole new level with his performance.
Nolan has been very forthcoming about his deep desire to direct a biopic of Howard Hughes over the years. And if it ever got made, it would probably be great. The director has spent decades trying to bring this dream project to life, yet no one seems willing to let him do it. Is it because Martin Scorsese already won a bunch of awards for The Aviator?
The Inception director has spoken at length about his admiration for Richard Hack’s Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters and Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness. He’s no stranger to adapting biographies he finds compelling for the big screen—Oppenheimer, after all, was based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer. It makes sense, given that Nolan is a literature grad turned filmmaker—someone who reads books and immediately sees their cinematic potential.
Talking to Showbiz Monkeys, Nolan revealed that Jim Carrey is his pick for the Hughes project that never was and perhaps never will be: “He is just perfect. He was born to play him. He just really is. This film has been discussed to be made for years in various forms but never has.”
He praised Carrey’s performance in 1999’s Man on the Moon, which was about eccentric performer Andy Kaufmann. You can see a throughline here: Kaufmann, like Hughes, was a very strange person and very difficult to understand. But Nolan specialises in films about men with shattered psyches, and Hughes fits the bill as well as anyone.
He added: “The casting is one of the things behind that. When you have that, and you hear Jim’s take on the characterisation, and you look at his extraordinary gift for channelling individuals like in his portrayal of Andy Kaufmann, you can see that Carrey is a very unique talent. What I need is an individual who can play all the unique aspects of the character of Hughes.”
Are we ever going to see Nolan’s Howard Hughes movie? It’s hard to say. The closest we’ve gotten is the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises, where Bruce Wayne is secluded in his mansion and visibly indifferent to his personal hygiene, with his staff of maids and waiters gossiping about his unseemly fingernails à la Hughes.
It also may be too late for Carrey to star in this potential project, but with the increasingly omnipresent incorporation of AI into the industry, who knows what the future holds?
