Jim Carrey on refusing to play Ace Ventura again: “I can’t go back”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jim Carrey was as big a movie star as you could imagine. His irreverent and physical performances in films like The Mask, Ace Ventura and Liar Liar established a uniquely Jim Carrey style that led to film executives being left with little choice regarding casting. He quickly captivated audiences and went on a string of box office hits.
While his emergence on the big screen came seemingly with a bang, Carrey was a bastion of the adage, “It takes ten years to become an overnight success”. Honest his craft on the stand-up circuit in the late 1980s and early ’90s, where, despite an SNL rejection, a reputation began to form for his sharp catalogue of impressions.
In 1994, after his breakout performance in The Mask, the Carrey effect snowballed across Hollywood, with movie-goers eagerly queuing around corners to watch him contort and twist in whatever physical character he was embodying next. Dancing to the beat of his own drum, Carrey existed in a league of his own, with no real comics adopting a similar method of approach in the era, thus landing him role after role to both commercial and critical acclaim.
While unconventional, his methodology was admired among his contemporaries, with Leonardo DiCaprio telling Rolling Stone, “I think Jim Carrey’s a genius. If he died today, he’d be regarded as Peter Sellers squared. And De Niro. He’s probably the most influential.”
One of Carrey’s most iconic characters of the decade was the Hawaiian shirt-wearing, quiff-sporting pet detective Ace Ventura. It was a film that had few creative and was fertile soil for Carrey’s unhinged and improvised approach.
In a 2022 conversation with Lad Bible, Carrey remembered the performance by stating: “I think if you want to go to the heart of the most animated and carefree performance I’ve ever done, you’d go to Ace Ventura,” he said. “It doesn’t care what it is, and I think that gave people a certain feeling of freedom from reality.”
It was a performance indicative of a comedian at their peak, relentlessly stealing scene after scene with humorous physicality that is undeniably difficult to sustain over the course of a 20-year career. Nonetheless, with all successful movies, there exists a community of dedicated fans who would salivate at the prospect of Carrey once again buttoning up the Hawaiian shirt.
When asked if he would ever return to the world of ‘wacky comedies’ by Film Threat in 2001, Carrey said: “I think half of the great stories ever told are comedies, so I can’t cut myself off from a part of myself. That’s a part of me and always will be,” he continued, “Would it be okay if that wacky comedy were Ace Ventura 3? I can’t go back and do stuff I’ve done. The frickin’ world could end tomorrow. I don’t want to be putting the old hair back on.”
In true Jim Carrey style, his answer to the question blurs the line between expectation and his own interpretation. While a third Ace Ventura would be a return to something he’s always done, it would be a fresh slate, an irreverent mirror held up to a new 21st-century world that he could underhandedly critique with a wide-eyed grin.
But while it would be exciting to see Carrey embody Ventura once more, the genius of his comedic innovation always hung firmly off of his defiance to move forward. The irreverence we were introduced to in the mid-1990s was so successful because of its freshness, so a 21st-century reboot of anything Jim Carrey would feel unauthentically Jim Carrey.
