The performance Jim Carrey claims he didn’t base on Bruce Willis: “Please don’t hunt me down”
These days, it’s hard to imagine an actor openly joking that they based their most venal, vicious, and murderous character on a fellow thespian. Yet, back in 2004, Bruce Willis could catch strays from Jim Carrey, and nobody batted an eyelid.
Obviously, this is a good thing, as we all love actors who can have a sense of humour about themselves and their crazy profession. As Carrey himself once said, despite being filthy rich and world famous, Hollywood’s A-list actors are actually a “very vulnerable group”. Why? Because beneath all the glamour, millions of dollars, and high-falutin’ talk of their craft, the vast majority of actors are riddled with insecurity and constantly worried about what people think of them. When you step back for a second, though, and realise their job involves pretending for a living, it can all get a little absurd.
So, when Carrey was asked to play the world’s worst actor, who also happens to be a murderous fake Count hellbent on murdering his orphaned cousins for their inheritance money, he jumped at the chance. Predictably, he knocked it out of the park, and to this day, his off-the-wall performance as the balding, bushy-eyebrowed, fake-nosed Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is one of his most beloved.
Amusingly, though, it’s likely that few fans know Carrey had one star in mind when crafting Olaf’s peculiar blend of narcissism, self-seriousness, and megalomania. That’s right: he claimed that the slaphead star of Die Hard, Armageddon, and The Sixth Sense was his main inspiration for the insecure and despicable Olaf in two separate interviews, before trying to walk it back slightly in the second one. Which is it, Jim?!
Indeed, when asked by the BBC, “Your character, Count Olaf, is a dreadful actor. Were you inspired by anyone in Hollywood?”, Carrey instantly exclaimed, “Bruce Willis! I’m kidding.” Then, to add insult to injury, he added, “Basically, the character is born out of an absolute black hole, void of a person or sense of self, which is so true of some actors.”
So far, so not-so-great for Willis – but then things got personal. “He’s an actor losing his hair, too,” Carrey mused, “which always adds a danger element.” At this point, Willis could have been forgiven for taking that one personally. After all, it’s one thing to make fun of the inherent emptiness at the core of every actor’s soul, but taking a potshot at their male pattern baldness, too? Not cool!
Then, not content with one joke at the expense of the po-faced star of Unbreakable, Carrey also told Dark Matters that Willis jumped into his head when thinking of how to portray a “terrible” actor. This time, though, he tried to defuse matters by quipping, “I’m kidding, Bruce, if you’re reading; please don’t hunt me down! You’re an action guy, I understand.”
To give Carrey some credit, he did admit that Willis wasn’t the only star he may (or may not) have had in mind when playing Olaf. He told MovieWeb that he also envisioned the character as “some kind of bird of prey who steals eggs from nests” and that he imbued him with an old-school acting style modelled on Orson Welles, of all people. “I wanted to be classical in this movie,” he noted, “and it was an opportunity, in a really silly way, to be classical.”
So, there you have it: Carrey really seemed to want the world to know that he didn’t base Count Olaf on Willis. Honest, no foolin’. He just couldn’t stop blurting his name out in interviews. Totally a coincidence. And he certainly wasn’t worried that John McClane himself would make him pay for his ‘joke’.
