The real reason Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t sanction Jim Carrey’s buffoonery: “That freaked him out”
Following the success of the first two movies in the rebooted Batman series in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the franchise faced a huge challenge.
Not only did Michael Keaton step down from the role of Bruce Wayne, but director Tim Burton also revealed he was on the way out, so new director Joel Schumacher needed to play all of his aces, which is precisely what he did.
Not only was rising star Val Kilmer brought in to lead the latest film, Batman Forever, but two superstars were drafted in to play the villains in the forms of Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey, cast as Two-Face and The Riddler, respectively.
Unfortunately, while their characters formed an alliance to take on the ‘Caped Crusader’, the two actors couldn’t have been further apart backstage. Jones has spoken many times about how much he hated Carrey during this period. He labelled him a “buffoon” and allegedly straight-up told his co-star that he hated him. This was hard for Carrey to swallow, as he had been a big fan of Jones up to that point.
“I was really looking forward to working with Tommy,” the funnyman told the Irish Independent, “He’s a fantastic actor and he still is to me, I mean he’s amazing, but he was a little crusty”.
If Jones is anything like the characters he tends to play, then “crusty” is the perfect word for him, but why did he react so poorly to his colleague? Observers have debated the feud for years. Schumacher suggests that Jones wasn’t used to being upstaged by someone as dynamic as Carrey, so he took out his frustrations on the Canadian. There’s also a story about Carrey swinging his prop cane around and accidentally striking his fellow villain in the crotch. Carrey has his own theory, though, one that doesn’t involve whacking someone in the balls.
“I think he was just a little freaked out because Dumb and Dumber came out on the same weekend as Cobb,” he continued, “Cobb was his big swing for the fences, and that didn’t work out and that freaked him out a bit.”
Cobb is a sports drama about the baseball player Ty Cobb, who you may know from the foul-mouthed Soundgarden song of the same name, which saw Jones play an older, embittered version of the legendary centre fielder, hiring journalist Al Stump, played by Robert Wuhl, to ghostwrite his autobiography in an effort to set the record straight about his life. Despite appearing in a number of ‘Best of’ lists at the end of 1994, Cobb was a box office bomb. As for Dumb and Dumber, which actually came out two weeks later, that wound up as the seventh highest-grossing movie of the year.
Whether it was jealousy over Cobb, Carrey’s lack of seriousness, or some combination of the above, Tommy Lee Jones failed to cover himself in glory on the set of Batman Forever. At least he has always been upfront about his dislike for his co-star. Nobody could ever accuse him of being ‘two-faced’…sorry.
