Jim Carrey thinks there is one actor nobody will ever match: “An unreachable star”
He may not have carried through on his intentions to retire completely, but it’s nonetheless clear that the mainstream Hollywood career of Jim Carrey is pretty much over in the strictest sense.
Since 2016’s double-whammy of dystopian thriller The Bad Batch and crime drama Dark Crimes – both of which flopped and were hardly dripping in widespread praise – the star has appeared in just three movies, all of which have seen him playing the scenery-chewing Dr Robotnik in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
The shift reflects a broader change in Carrey’s relationship with Hollywood. After decades of carrying blockbuster comedies and commanding enormous paydays, he has increasingly spoken about prioritising personal fulfilment over the relentless demands of studio filmmaking.
He did make a detour into prestige television with creator Dave Holstein’s episodic dramedy Kidding, though, but the series was cancelled after two seasons and 20 instalments in July 2020 despite Carrey earning a Golden Globe nomination in the ‘Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy’ category for his efforts.
The rubber-faced funnyman has been gradually backing out of the spotlight for years, but at his peak, he was one of the biggest, most popular, and highest-paid stars in Hollywood. Even when he sojourned into more dramatic territory, the results were impeccable, even if it remains one of the great mysteries of recent Academy Awards history that he didn’t make the ‘Best Actor’ shortlist for The Truman Show.
That performance demonstrated that Carrey possessed far greater range than the elastic-faced comedy roles that first made him famous. By the late 1990s, films like The Truman Show and Man on the Moon proved he could balance humour with vulnerability in a way that surprised both critics and audiences alike.
A performance that required genuine gravitas and pathos to go along with vulnerability, empathy, and affability, there are definite shades of James Stewart in Carrey’s work, which may well have been intentional considering the legendary performer is the single greatest inspiration on Carrey’s entire career.
Admitting to Film Threat that he’d “loved Jimmy Stewart from the word go”, Carrey distanced himself from any intentionally overt homages in The Truman Show and beyond by explaining that he doesn’t compare himself to anyone when it comes to his work, although he still managed to bow down in the face of hagiography when illustrating just how much the highest-ranking actor in the history of the United States military meant to him both personally and professionally.
“Jimmy Stewart is an unreachable star to me. He was his thing and no one can ever be that again. I’m lucky to be in the same town and working in the same business that he was,” Carrey offered. “I don’t try to concentrate on that. I just try to make it as real and as interesting as possible when I’m doing it. Then when they say cut I sit around and beg for compliments.”
Carrey’s confession was born from suggestions The Majestic gave him the purest and most obvious chance to emulate Stewart he’d found yet, and while he was happy to say he was “a big fan” of the icon’s most famous grandstanding showcases in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story, he was adamant it wasn’t a deliberate facsimile.
