Jim Carrey gave a strange interview. Jim Carrey (reluctantly) returns to Hollywood: visiting the actor, artist and Trump-era agitator

In his first long years interview former $20 million-per-film star Jim Carrey, now a political cartoonist, talks about his disappearance, personal pain, outrage and the reason he's returning to screens with a new Showtime series called Kidding: "I wasn't planning on joining to Hollywood. I planned to destroy him."

Jim Carrey is exhausted. So exhausted that my eyelids droop and every cell of my body is exhausted. Exhausted to the level of I-haven't-exerted-this-in-years.

We're well outside of Pasadena, in Santa Anita Park, it's just past ten o'clock in the evening, and Jim Carrey is deep in character. He tucks his shaggy hair behind his ears, wipes beads of sweat from his forehead and Once again trying to deliver a four and a half minute monologue that he had no time to memorize. If everything went smoothly, they would be finished soon and he would be home by midnight. But in television terms, four and a half minutes is an eternity, and it doesn’t work out smoothly. Under the scorching lights of the spotlight, Kerry practically does not see the teleprompter and constantly stumbles over his speech.

“Damn it,” he mutters in the middle of the fourth take, although it may already be the fifth.

He falters again.

"Damn, damn, damn."

He desperately tries to continue working, but now the operator needs to recharge. Everyone is waiting. The extras behave as quietly as mice, and the team does the same. A few more tense minutes pass, and then something happens. Kerry does another take. And one more. His fist knocks. The eyes are filled. He channels his frustration into work, and it works. His old friend Michel Gondry, with whom he first worked in 2003 on"Eternal Sunshine" pure reason» , sits relaxed in the director's chair. Here's the Jim Carrey he remembers.

The Jim Carrey that the rest of Hollywood remembers is the guy who first demanded $20 million for a film; the one who shot to success on his weekly program on Fox"In Living Color"and how the meteor achieved fame with a string of hits ("Ace Ventura", "Mask", "Dumb and Dumber" ). The industry tirelessly wrote him checks for large sums; Kerry was just tired of cashing them in. There was no turning point or breakdown. He simply began to work less and less, and then stopped altogether. And then, just when he felt he was ready to appear in public again, along came Showtime's comedy-drama"Kidding"— and with it the opportunity to play Jeff Pickles, a Mister Rogers-style children's television icon who has difficulty maintaining his public image as a gentle and decent person while his personal life is going to hell. In the premiere episode of the program, which will be released on September 9, among the issues raised will be the issue of burden public life, which must be painfully familiar to an actor who has all but renounced his own fame.

“I just didn’t want to be in this business anymore,” Kerry says the next day when I join him in the living room of his ranch-style home in Brentwood, where he lives alone. He bought this place 23 years ago with his movie royalties."Dumb and Dumber" , and now it is a temple to his second career as a visual artist - overflowing with paintings, drawings and sculptures. “I didn’t like what was happening, the massive corporate takeover and all that. Perhaps it was also because I was drawn to a different kind of creativity and I liked having control over the picture - I liked the fact that there was no committee in my way telling me what idea was best perceived in some four-quadrant nonsense." .

Since the 2016 election, Jim Carrey has also begun to develop his skills as a political cartoonist, delighting his nearly 18 million followers with mocking caricatures of Donald Trump. Sitting at home with a sketchbook and a cup of acrylic markers turned out to be the perfect antidote to show business; and while his work has yet to receive a response from the President or the "sociopaths" in the White House, it has brought Kerry back into the public eye in a renewed way. After the necessary persuasion from the creator"Kidding"Dave Holstein, who created Mr. Pickles specifically for him, and the heads of the Showtime channel, Carrey signed a contract to participate in a big project for the first time in many years.

But now, surrounded by art that has absorbed his creative energy, Kerry, 56, warns me against the forced-return style of storytelling he's noticed I've begun to adopt. He speaks softly, but with definite intentions. “I’m not going back to where I was,” he says. “I’m no longer that little Jim trying to hold on to a place in the stratosphere—I don’t think I’m trying to hold on to anything anymore.”

When I visit Kerry at the end of July, he finishing touches to a new skit disparaging Trump. As we settle into chairs in the living room, he dictates instructions to his assistant Brogan on how to sign the drawing when he posts it on Twitter to his growing audience.

A couple of hours later, the sketch - a portrait of Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen, posted in the form of a GIF - has already gained almost 800 retweets. “I knew that sooner or later I would find a decent way to run Twitter,” Kerry notes with pleasure. “My manager used to say, ‘Don’t do anything like that there. You've lost your mind."

Over all these years, Kerry's sanity has been questioned more than once. As everyone remembers, in the spring of 2017 he appeared on the showJimmy Kimmel Live!with a long, bushy beard, throwing out phrases like "Jim Carrey is a great character and I'm very lucky to get this role." A few months later, at a New York Fashion Week event, he told a reporter on the red carpet, “I wanted to come to the most pointless event I could.” And: “I believe that we are a field of energy dancing for itself. And I don't care. I dont exist". His strange behavior came at a time when social media was terribly fixated on sad story his ex-girlfriend and make-up artist Catriona White, whose relatives tried to drag Kerry into a horrific legal battle over her 2015 suicide. This is the one topic that is considered taboo in Carrey's life, although he seems to make many veiled references to the pain it caused him.

“I’m no longer that little Jim trying to hold on to his place in the stratosphere.”

His presence in in social networks is now almost entirely limited to his political art, although he does not have access to his own account, and each post is given permission by at least three people (“just friends,” he says). “In my position, I think it's very helpful to have a buffer,” he tells me. His pal Dana Vacon, with whom he is working on a top-secret book, describes Carrey's work as protest art, but the actor says he's not just watching this nightmare unfold: "I need to transform unpleasant things that I see are in art." He often draws late into the night after being too a large number of news on TV will bring it to the desired state. (His favorite channel is MSNBC, and Rachel Maddow is his favorite news anchor.)

Looking ahead, Jim Carrey wants to host more Active participation offline in this too, but doesn’t know how yet. He is asked to support a candidate or use his name in some campaign, as big stars usually do. He says he makes decisions wisely. “I try to avoid Hillary fundraisers that happen near me. From time to time I hear about them. She suits them almost around the clock. It's something like“ Oh, Hillary is there now? Yeah, standing there asking for money?” This kind of world doesn’t suit me,” he says. “But I will support the local guys and try to make sure [House Majority Leader] Kevin McCarthy doesn't come back. I'd like to kick [Congressman] Devin Nunes out of there forever. What about Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan? What a damn collection of slackers. It’s just the worst of us, bringing out the worst in us.”

Now he's just on fire, and this is the most animated state in which I can catch him.

“Watching half the country ignore what is right under their noses is like standing on railroad tracks and joyfully welcoming a locomotive that is about to run over you:“ Look at him, look how beautiful he is. How fast he is. He's approaching so quickly...” “He laughs through his anger. “When the FBI finally catches him and he hands over the keys to his Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago and what have you, there will be a celebration in this country like never before. I guarantee you this."

“So the question is not ‘if’, but ‘when’ will this happen?” - I ask. “Of course, when,” he says. - “Either “when”, or we’re done.”

Kerry could talk politics for hours, but he wants to show off his work, so I follow him with a tape recorder as he winds his way through the hallways of the house.

Vakon half-jokingly described this place to me as a “Buddhist monastery,” but, apparently, in last time he was herebeforehow Kerry covered every wall of the house with his vibrant artwork. My tour included at least twenty paintings: a portrait of Jesus of all races hanging at the entrance (“I wanted to capture the consciousness of Christ as he passed through the ether”); a portrait of Lindsay Lohan from her 2011 trial in the kitchen (“The image of her, dressed to the nines and spending all her time in court, could not leave my mind”), and on the way to the bedroom hangs a painting he calls “Bonnie” and Clyde, played by Barbie and Ken,” which brings us back to the infamous death scene.

From there, Kerry leads me out the back door into the sculpture garden he created, which is as impressive as anything he's done inside. He tells me that this is where he sets up his salons. "Most The best way to spend an evening is to invite a bunch of friends,” he says, “and invite some brilliant Ph.D. or someone like Eckhart Tolle, who made his own way into spiritual world, and bombard them with questions.” Not everyone on Kerry's guest list, let alone his inner circle, shares it spiritual path. “I support him, but I don’t share his path,” says Michael Aguilar, his producing partner. - “When I hear:“ I don’t exist,” I think, “Yeah, I’m happy for you. And I exist, American Express is calling me, and I need to pay this bill somehow, so let’s do it.”

I see the moon goddess standing in the center of the garden. I find out what her name isAyla, and Kerry spent two years sculpting it in his foundry in downtown Los Angeles. Kerry would swear that when the light of the full moon hits her eyelids, they open. “It’s like she’s waking up,” he enthuses, before leading me to what at first glance looks like a religious symbol. But it turns out to be a huge "T" with an "I" carved inside it. And then I cease to understand the course of his thinking.

“Initially I didn’t know why I was doing this, but as usually happens, I wake up a year or two later and realize that through this I was given a spiritual answer,” he says. “I’ve been looking for my identity for a long time, trying to understand who I am, and here it is. That's the question. If there is an “it” in this world, it is “Who am I?” (“Who am I?”) “I” (“I”) does not yet exist, but is already taking shape. Do you know what I mean? And at this moment I would sincerely want to understand what he means.

Kerry's existential journey began in his childhood bedroom in suburban Toronto, where he spent all his time writing poetry and what he considered philosophy at that age. “Just trying to figure out who we are and why we’re here,” he shrugs. - “Well, classic.”

When he wasn't philosophizing, Kerry prepared performances for family guests. By the age of 9 or 10, he had 120 skits in his arsenal. For extra laughs, he would often do something hyperbolic, such as throw himself down the stairs. “My parents treated my comedy routines as something special—in some ways, I was what made them special,” he says. His older sisters and brother also supported him. “I was always from another planet, but they loved me and encouraged me. They all said, 'Get Jim here.'"

Initially, Kerry simply liked the attention. But over time, he became increasingly involved in comedy to cheer up his parents.

“Mom wasn’t feeling very well most of the time,” he says when we first broach the subject. Later he himself returns to her. “My mother was addicted to painkillers. She was very sick in many ways. She was also very sweet, but her parents were alcoholics and she had her own problems. She didn't intentionally pull away from me—she was always there, always home—but if you're high on painkillers, that counts, too. I think we've all been abandoned to some degree, by someone or something, and that shapes our self-image."

Jim Carrey with his daughter Jane (from his first marriage) and his second wife Lauren Holly in 1995

Kerry had a different relationship with her father. Little Jim Carrey really wanted to be like Percy Carrey, who managed to see the beginning of his son’s career. “My father was the kind of man who could just stand in the middle of the room and everyone around him would dance to his tune,” he says. “He was simply incredible.” Before having children, he was a saxophonist, but gave up his dream of jazz orchestra in favor of a more prudent accounting career. When Jim was about twelve years old, Percy lost his job and things took a turn for the worse for a while.

Kerry got involved with the hooligans. “I was angry,” he says. “My father had problems, and I blamed the whole world for it. When you are a child, the thought does not occur to you: “Maybe my dad did a bad job. Maybe he hated his job so much that he acted like a moral skunk." When Percy got a job at a wine factory, Jim Carreyand his brothers joined their father, working eight-hour shifts after school as security guards and cleaners. At the age of 14, Kerry began carrying a baseball bat to work. “Everyone had knives and sharpeners, I was in the center of all this madness. And this didn’t scare me at all. Iwanted fight".

His grades, as well as his relationships, suffered as a result. By 10th grade, the former straight-A student was counting down the days until he could legally drop out of school. On his 16th birthday, he did just that. The father cried, but did not argue with his son. “Sometimes,” says Kerry, “I wish he would argue.” Sometimes he wonders what his life might have been like—“how dangerous I would have been,” he smiles—if he had stayed in school. But he had one salvation: his father began taking him to comedy clubs in Toronto, where he caught a glimpse of another possible variant of your future. During the day, spending long hours at the factory, in the evening young Kerry performed at an “open microphone”.

Eventually the one came crucial moment, when the Kerry family quit their factory jobs and drove off into the sunset in a minivan. “I know it sounds sad,” he says now. “We lived in tent camps or in the village, in my sister’s yard. And yes, of course, it got cold in the tents, but for some reason those times were so happy.” Kerry's family was together and they learned to laugh again. And although Jim Carrey didn’t know it yet, comedy became his salvation.

Carrey was still doing James Dean and Jimmy Stewart impersonations in Toronto when he got his first break: he was asked to open the Rodney Dangerfield show at Caesars Palace.

Nights in Las Vegas turned into years on the road, and then, right after Carrey became famous in America, he did what only Jim Carrey could do: he abandoned all the skits that had helped him become famous and started experiment with everything that seemed funny to him that evening.

“Think about it: Most comedians have been perfecting the same routine for years, and then Jim comes on stage and talks about whatever comes into his head,” says his pal Judd Apatow, who met the comedian at late 80s, and then worked with him on"The Cable Guy"(1996). “Sometimes he did very well, and a second later he failed like no one before. And then he somehow found a way to win over the audience again, and it was all so spontaneous, bold and risky. Jim Carrey is one of those people that comedians talk about as if he's in some other business than what we do. Like regular rock bands talking about something David Bowie does.”

Although he had only just moved to Los Angeles in the early '80s, Carrey had already flirted with television, landing a role on the short-lived NBC sitcom"Duck Factory" , a real star he became in the series"IN bright colors» . Among the cast, which included Jamie Foxx and several Wayans, it was Carrey who established himself as a crowd favorite, thanks to such consistently weird characters as Fire Inspector Bill, who regularly set himself on fire. Returning home in the evening, he worked on "Ace Ventura" Carrey's intention for the 1994 film was simple: to make fun of the main character. “I didn’t plan to join Hollywood, I planned to destroy it,” he says. - "IN literally, take a huge sledgehammer and hit all the “main characters” and all this seriousness with it.” Colleagues on the series"In bright colors" They made fun of him. “[David Alan] Greer came out to the audience (not as a character, but as yourself , and said): “During the hiatus, Jim will be filming a film called"Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" . Let's wish him luck." And everyone mocked me - they pretended to applaud and laugh at me.”

A few days before release"Ace Ventura"Kerry was in Chicago doing a comedy gig. The management invited him to dinner and told him the bad news: Siskel and Ebert, the most influential film critics, did not like the film at all. “They hated him fiercely,” he says. But when the film was released, it grossed more than $100 million. Kerry became an overnight sensation. His fee of $450,000 for"Mask", which was agreed before"Ace Ventura", turned into $7 million for"Dumb and Dumber" . By the time of filming"The Cable Guy"Kerry became the most highly paid actor– and undoubtedly one of the most recognizable.

Jim Carrey with Courtney Love in famous movie Milos Forman's Man on the Moon (1999), during which Carrey used the Stanislavski Method of Acting

His new life had its advantages: famous lovers (Renée Zellweger, Jenny McCarthy), fancy cars and helicopters, which studios still use to transport him to remote locations (yes, including Santa Anita). But fame also had its unexpected emotional consequences. “It’s like weightlessness,” he says. – “You can dream about it as much as you like, but when you become famous, you realize that these are not the conditions in which it is comfortable to stay for a long time».

Popularity also affected his loved ones: friends, several ex-wives, Jane's daughter. Although she and Jane are still very close - just as Carrey is close with his eight-year-old son Jackson, whose baseball games he sometimes spends entire weekends at - growing up in Jim Carrey's shadow was not easy for her. “Somewhere in first grade, she wrote in her diary: ‘I know the older kids want to be friends with me because of my dad,’” he says. “And when I picked her up from school, the entire school playground gathered around me because I was the embodiment of their favorite characters. Looking back on it, I think how difficult it must have been for her to find herself in all of this - she was so strongly characterized by her father.”

We dwell on this topic a little longer. He tells me that his world is small because “outside these gates I am known to everyone.” There is some heaviness in Kerry's voice. “There were some studies that collected data on how familiarization with the project changes the result. So how can people, knowing who I am, looking at me and paying attention to me, not influence the outcome? Not influence what happens in the store or restaurant? This changes everything. I transform a room when I walk into it.”

For a long time, Kerry did not stop, starring in one film after another. He believed that every film should either develop him as an actor ("The Truman Show"), or must be stunningly funny ("Liar, liar").

A project that included both was the 1999 film “Man on the Moon", for which, during filming, which stretched over many months, Carrey almost completely transformed into the late showman Andy Kaufman and his vulgar alter ego, Tony Clifton. Last year, behind-the-scenes footage from the famous film became the subject of documentary film from Netflix"Jim and Andy: Underworld" , which earned Carrey an Emmy nomination. At one point in the documentary, Carrey says that studio management "Man on the Moon "Universal has tried to hide this footage in the past to save its reputation. Referring to himself in the third person, Carrey says, "So people don't think Jim is an asshole."

Examples of this "asshole" behavior, compiled from hundreds of hours of twenty-year-old footage, include Carrey as Clifton collapsing, mocking the crew, and storming into Steven Spielberg's office at Amblin Entertainment to criticize the director's work. . Kerry's producing partner, Aguilar listened to people's feedback on revealing Method Acting when playing his friend. “All the actors I worked with came up to me [after watching"Jim and Andy"] and said, 'Hey, when you see Jim, thank him for telling the truth,'" he says. “And all the producers I knew said: “Dude.” As if to say, “This is what I understand!”

Kerry met Gondry a few years after"Man on the Moon" , while the actor was healing his broken heart(the timeline says it was Zellweger, but Carrey doesn't give away the name). Gondry suggested using this pain in creativity. “Oh, he thought it was wonderful,” Kerry laughs about it now. - “We had to film"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" only a year later, and he asked (Gondry's strong French accent ): “Please continue to suffer.” At that time, the director went to visit his star on the set"Bruce Almighty" . Carrey was then involved in a powerful staircase scene, but Gondry was more interested in what happened between takes. “Jim was out of character, and I noticed the loneliness in his eyes,” he says. “And I said to myself: “I need to film this loneliness.” Although Gondry never admitted to doing so, Carrey remains convinced that he chose the people around the actor at the beginning of the film to be like his ex "just to mess with my head."

Eventually "Eternal Sunshine"turned out to be one of Carrey's most impressive works, demonstrating his skill as a dramatic actor. Over time, his choice of work became darker and stranger, reaching its apogee in Ana Lily Amirpour's tiny dystopian Western"Bad Batch", in which Carrie doesn't say a word. The 2016 role came about after a series of meetings with directors that Agular arranged several years ago, when Carrey was at the height of his frustration. “This was done in order to introduce him to young directors, for example, the Duplass brothers, who immediately said: “We came into cinema because of you, but we have some new ideas for you, that’s how we want you.” “We didn’t see it,” he says. “And then Jim got really, really interested.”

Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura (1994). He says that after that “everything changed.”

When Agular read the pilot script"Kidding", he thought that this might also attract Kerry's attention. “It's about a character who has a made-up public persona that he doesn't relate to at all,” he says. “It's about a person who wants to do something that's different from him, but people keep telling him, 'No, This must not be done under any circumstances.” What am I talking about - it’s Jim.” Showtime CEO David Nevins immediately saw the potential in casting Carrey. “I loved the idea of ​​Jeff Pickles being able to portray the loud, ridiculous Jim Carrey that everyone has loved since"Ace Ventura" And "Dumb and Dumber" , he says, “But also that serious and dark Jim Carrey from"Eternal Sunshine" .

Although later to cast joined by Catherine Keener, Judy Greer and Frank Langella, it was Gondry who was the factor that made Kerry feel comfortable enough to sign the standard five-year contract. True, his six-figure fee was not so standard - but it wasn’t about the money. Kerry doesn't need more money.

“You’re always waiting for a project that feels like it’s part of you,” he says. - “It coincided here life experience. I suffered a great loss, but somehow I came out on the other side, where I can look anyone in the eye and feel like I'm on the same team with them. I understand that at some point in life, a river of grief can surge and simply choke you.”

In a few days he will finish the first season of work on"Kidding", will cut off his shaggy hair and head to Vancouver, where he will play the main villain in"Sonic the Hedgehog", his first major studio film in years. I'm wondering if Kerry feels obligated to return to those commercial successful projects, which delighted millions of his fans. He insists that the answer is no and that it is independent of the wishes of the commercial world.

“But I can hear their voices,” Jim Carrey tells me. “I hear people say, 'Why doesn't he just want to be funny?' It just never meant much to me. For me it's like today's experiment. If you like it, great, if not, great too. Tomorrow another one will begin.”

“I understand that at some point in life, a river of grief can wash over you and just choke you,” he says.