Over the weekend, actor Jim Carrey made a ton of people look at their TVs, computers and mobile devices with the most quizzical looks possible, thanks to a bizarre red carpet interview in which he told a reporter he didn't believe she existed, while also bringing up tetrahedrons. Well, Carrey explained that strange stance on life in another interview, and while some may have suspected narcotics or a long lack of sleep, the Eternal Sunshine star took things up a notch in the left-field existentialism department.
As an actor, you play characters, and if you go deep enough into those characters, you realize your own character is pretty thin to begin with. You suddenly have this separation and go, 'Who's Jim Carrey? Oh, he doesn't exist actually. There's just a relative manifestation of consciousness appearing, and someone gave him a name, a religion, a nationality, and he clustered those together into something that's supposed to be a personality, and it doesn't actually exist.' None of that stuff, if you drill down, is real.
One wonders if Jim Carrey has adhered to this branding for his entire career, since it would be interesting to know just how deep he went into the role In Living Color's Fire Marshall Bill, or Ace Ventura, or even Batman Forever's The Riddler. Okay, so those first two were said in jest, but it might actually be interesting to see if Carrey went to Heath-Ledger-as-The-Joker lengths to find the madness of Edward Nygma. Or maybe not. Such is the power of Carrey's explanation that I don't even know what I think is interesting anymore, because maybe there is no me within which interest can form.
Jim Carrey provided this clarification of sorts with TheWrap while at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - The Story of Jim Carrey & Andy Kaufman Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. It's more than possible that being back in that Andy Kaufman headspace is what's reviving Carrey's dogged style of method acting/living -- he referred to his creative process for the biopic Man on the Moon as being "psychotic" at times -- and while this post-human zen-esque outlook is baffling to hear about, I'm all for it if that's what makes the actor comfortable with his day to day life. But then, considering Kaufman was a master at manipulating situations that weren't entirely real, who knows what Carrey is up to?
Of course, the above wasn't the only thing he had to say about it all. In case anyone was wondering why Jim Carrey sought fame in the first place, he's got an answer.
I believe I got famous so I could let go of fame, and it's still happening, but not with me. I'm not a part of it anymore. Dressing happens, doing hair happens, interviewing happens, but it happens without me, without the idea of a 'me.' You know what I'm saying? It's a weird little semantic jump, and it's not that far, but it's a universe apart from where most people are. I'm not the continuum. There's no me. It's just what's happening. It's not personal. Things are happening, and they're going to happen whether I attach myself as an ego to it or not. There's grooves that are cut pretty deep from my entire life. There's still an energy that wants to be admired and wants to be clever, and there's still an energy that wants to free people from concern, and now it goes further. I want to relate what this is to people so they can also glimpse the abyss! It sounds scary, but it's not. Everything still happens.
In some awesome news that may or may not have anything to do with Jim Carrey's uniqueness going viral, Netflix just yesterday acquired the rights to the Jim & Andy documentary. So it might not be long before we get to hear a larger abundance of Carrey's identity-sidestepping thought patterns, this time in a movie proper. While waiting for that to be released, head to our fall premiere schedule to see all the new and returning TV shows on the way.
