What made Tommy Lee Jones hate Jim Carrey?: “Rather inspiring in his boldness”
Does anybody really hate Jim Carrey? He of rubber face and ever-bending limb, the man behind the “mask”, Ace Ventura himself and the man who brought us the genius of Dumb and Dumber’s Lloyd Christmas? The comedy actor who made the world laugh again and again to the point of tears? Well, the answer to that is yes, but we’ll come to that later.
Carrey has now been gracing our screens for more than thirty years, and his performances in some of the biggest comedy hits in history during the 1990s are honestly beyond reproach. From the original Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to Liar Liar to Me, Myself & Irene, Carrey was the absolute embodiment of the phrase ‘comedy is commitment to the bit’ as he threw himself on the floor, contorted his body and gave us a hundred different catchphrases in the bargain.
Perhaps what he did wasn’t entirely new, where he himself has said of the great comedian Jerry Lewis, “I am because he was”, but through force of will and talent, he made himself into one of the decade’s biggest movie stars and brought in almost a billion in profits at the box office.
He once, in fact, before he was famous, wrote himself a cheque for some $10million and signed it ‘for services rendered’, carrying it around with him, almost daring the universe to fulfil his dreams. Once he booked The Mask, which included a seven-figure salary, he placed the cheque in his late father’s jacket pocket at his funeral.
It’s that kind of ambition that took the Canadian from a little-known character actor on a US TV show to landing the role of Riddler in the mega-money Batman Forever movie in 1995. Directed by Joel Schumacher, it was an enormous, star-packed affair with Carrey taking his place alongside Val Kilmer, Nicole Kidman and Tommy Lee Jones, and it was the latter that Carrey initially clashed with.
Lee Jones was playing Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent and had the misfortune to be on the wrong end of one of Carrey’s primary props for the movie—namely, his twirling cane. “Cracked me right in the family jewels,” said Jones. Despite the cracker collision, the veteran actor found Carrey “just a down-to-earth good guy and rather inspiring in his boldness in that character”.
It was widely reported that the main source of friction on set came from Schumacher clashing with Batman himself, the late Val Kilmer. The director apparently found his leading actor “childish and impossible” and accused him of being rude to members of the crew, to which Kilmer responded by refusing to speak to him. But the director also spoke about Jones as a source of trouble at the time, saying, “Jim Carrey was a gentleman, and Tommy Lee was threatened by him. I’m tired of defending overpaid, overprivileged actors. I pray I don’t work with them again.”
One can imagine a seasoned Lee Jones perhaps being slightly overawed by the manic energy of Carrey, certainly a mid-90s Carrey at the peak of his powers. You only need to watch a few of the blooper reels from the movies the actor made at the time to understand that he rarely, if ever, turned off. Presumably, he could be fairly exhausting.
As Schumacher noted, “Tommy is used to stealing the show. He definitely met his match here and, many times, was surprised by it. It kept everybody on their toes. Jim is such an athlete, and athletes know their personal best.”
In a 2014 interview, Carrey acknowledged that Jones was not friendly to him, and recounted an incident wherein Jones told him, in very clear terms, “I hate you. I really don’t like you… I cannot sanction your buffoonery“. As we said at the start, it’s possible that not everyone likes Jim Carrey.
