Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Jim Carrey faces his fears in numerology thriller

Jim Carrey is used to making fans scream with laughter, but this weekend, he just wants them to scream.

The moody thriller “The Number 23” opens Feb. 23 with the actor best known for goofy nice-guy roles playing a man who goes psychotic obsessing over numerology that may be linked to a long-ago murder.

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It’s a departure even from Carrey’s dramatic work in such films as “Man on the Moon” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and it’s miles away from such comedies as “Bruce Almighty” and “Liar, Liar” that made him one of Hollywood’s top stars.

“I get a lot of questions like, ‘Aren’t you afraid your audience won’t like what you’re doing?’ ” says Carrey, 45, sitting on the open-air porch of his Los Angeles office on a gray February afternoon. He shrugs. He doesn’t look very afraid.

“Sometimes I have two sets of fans,” he says, the larger group who prefer his comedies and the other, admittedly smaller set, who prefer his dramas. “Sometimes they cross over.”

One crossover, he says, was the 1998 movie “The Truman Show.” A mix of comedy, drama, science fiction and satire, it was his first lead role that didn’t feature his wildly popular loose-limbed physical comedy. It’s also a movie that the star says reflects his real philosophy toward work: The Truman character, who lives his whole life as the secret subject of a reality show, discovers the truth and must decide whether to leave the safety of his fishbowl existence.

“I refer to that movie because that’s what it meant for me: You have to go into the abyss and the unknown and risk everything. Face your fear. ... New territory — that’s what I want, always. Whether it be funny or dramatic or whatever,” he says. “I don’t want to patronize my audience. They’ll be the first ones to get tired of me if I do.”

Canceled projects

Professionally, he has had some setbacks over the past year. He fired his agents after two high-profile films — the comedy “Used Guys” with Ben Stiller and the Tim Burton fantasy-drama “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” — fell through over budget concerns.

Studios have been making public overtures about reducing star salaries, and Carrey is one of the highest paid in the business, often more than $20 million a picture. He says it’s just the influence of corporate parents trying to keep movie costs low.

“But believe me, they’re not losing money,” says Carrey, whose movies have brought in close to $2 billion domestically.

He says he lowers his asking price for a smaller, art-house film, such as “Eternal Sunshine.”

“But if it’s a project that can make half a billion dollars [as “Bruce Almighty” did, worldwide], I should make that money,” he says.

Carrey still hopes to resurrect “Ripley’s” but is glad “Used Guys” didn’t come together, because he has spent the time focusing on other projects.

Despite those setbacks, as long as he delivers a big comedy periodically, his blockbuster status in the industry is assured because of the bond he has created with his fans, says Peter Guber, a Hollywood producer and co-host of AMC’s show business talk show “Sunday Morning Shootout.”

Movies such as “The Number 23” can certainly place that bond at risk, but stars who repeat themselves too much can do the same and make for an unhappy career even if there is financial success.

“In terms of the choices he makes to stretch and expand himself as an actor, that may be at odds with what audiences expect and a studio desires, but he’s one person and has to manage his career and life with what he wants to get out of it,” Guber says. “There are only so many meals you can eat and so many cars you can drive, so emotional satisfaction and creative satisfaction are important.”

Carrey says his personal life has been much more tranquil recently. Though he tends to be guarded about his private life, he opened up about girlfriend Jenny McCarthy, 34, saying the relationship may be the best he has ever had.

“Jen’s a sweetheart, and really wonderful and deeper than people know. And I’m more ready to be loved than I have been in my life,” says Carrey, who has a child from his first marriage and is divorced from Lauren Holly. He was engaged to Renee Zellweger, but they broke it off. He says his relationship with McCarthy is strong because he has gotten over a lot of insecurities.

“I had the feeling a lot of times when I was in relationships before that I hadn’t become a complete person on my own. I was hiding and going, ‘I need you to fill in the puzzle,’ and that’s not what love is. That’s dysfunctional love to me.

“Being a whole person is the only shot you’ve got at finding a person who’s healthy and whole themselves.”

Lately, reporters have been acting like overeager potential mothers-in-law, asking him whether he and McCarthy will marry. He says they don’t plan on it.

(Later that evening, he telephones to clarify, saying it’s a mutual decision, and he doesn’t want to sound as if he’s not serious about McCarthy, which he is. “Neither of us believes marriage is necessary to show your true emotions. And there are not enough diamond rings in the world to match her worth.”)

Though he has exerted great effort to show Hollywood he’s more than just a funny face, Carrey is still funny in person.

He isn’t always “on” with rapid-fire jokes, but he’s not sullen or introverted.

“He’s immensely nice, but just serious and down-to-earth,” says Fernley Phillips, the screenwriter of “The Number 23.” “He’s somewhat quiet. Though there are little flashes of jokes, he’s just not that person 24/7.”

An audience changes him. Subdued in his rare solo interviews, Carrey always is a cut-up in news conferences.

At his office, he becomes animated when his staff gathers to greet him, regaling them with a real-life blonde joke, of sorts: The day after he went to the Super Bowl with McCarthy, they were leaving the hotel, and he pointed out how a massive party the night before was now just a bunch of debris, saying it reminded him of a soundstage after the filming was over — alive one day, dead the next.

McCarthy suggested absently: Wouldn’t it be interesting to make a movie where the whole world was just a big movie set?

He doesn’t say the words “The Truman Show,” but his staffers start laughing. After a beat of silence, he says that McCarthy went: “Oh, right ...”

There is a superstitious side to Carrey. His production company is called JC23, and it was named that long before he saw the script for “The Number 23.”

Magic or coincidence?

The so-called “23 enigma” is a sort of urban legend concerning how often the digits turn up in science and history. Conspiracy figures like to ascribe something magical to it, while skeptics say it’s just a coincidence that has been exaggerated in fiction.

“It could be just our minds, wanting to see patterns to believe in miraculous things,” says Carrey, who says he began noticing the number turn up in his life after a friend pointed out the mythos to him.

He thought it was fun, but then he noticed the 23rd Psalm, the one that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

“It’s about living without fear. And I thought it was a good idea for the name of the company, with the idea that I would make my choices courageously.”

Then friend Brad Silberling, who directed Carrey in “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events,” showed him the script to “The Number 23.” It was a thriller, which Carrey hadn’t done.

It seemed like a sign.

He sees the number’s appearance in his life as more than coincidence.

“There are no mistakes in the world,” he says. “I believe everything means something. To me, [the number] is just the universe tapping me on the shoulder every time I see it, going ... ‘There’s some kind of intelligence behind everything.’ ”

Carrey knows the movie is a risk for him. He is untested in a thriller, and it has been a while since he has had a movie in theaters. The most recent one was 2005’s “Fun With Dick and Jane,” and it will be another year before his next project, as a voice in the animated “Horton Hears a Who,” set for 2008.

Carrey has never been prolific, unlike comedic contemporaries such as Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell, who fit their dramatic work in between healthy doses of audience-pleasing comedies.

“We worked with him a couple times, and Jim did one project at a time. He was 100 percent focused on one thing,” says Bobby Farrelly, who co-wrote and directed “Dumb & Dumber” and “Me, Myself & Irene” with brother Peter.

Carrey acknowledges that may be frustrating for the people who look to him for some laughter, but says he has several projects in the works, and “one of them will definitely be a comedy.”

But it seems frustrating for him, too, as one of the rare public figures whose approval ratings would probably go up if he talked out of his rear end again, as he did in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”

Comedy “is a color of the rainbow, but I’m the rainbow, not the color. I’m the whole [expletive] thing,” he says, laughing.

Final impressions?

He has done this before — resisted the safe performance. He got interested in comedy as a little boy growing up in Canada. At first, he just tried to cheer up his mother, who was frequently in ill health and suffered from depression. Then it became something more.

“I remember having this actual thought when I was 7 or 8 years old: I’m going to prove to my mother that I’m a miracle and that her life is worth something,” he says. She died in 1991 but lived to see him become a TV star on “In Living Color.”

But before that, in spite of his desire to become famous, he still took a potentially career-ending risk.

Carrey had established a popular act, full of celebrity impressions, but after performing it for years, he dropped it to do more observational jokes.

“The thing that would kick into my head was: Force yourself to change. You’re a producer of creative things, and there will always be something else. Always.”

What would have happened if he hadn’t taken that risk?

“I would be in Vegas right now,” he says. “Maybe I’d be a headline impressionist, and I would live for the day when somebody famous would come in so I could go down and do an impression of him at his table. And everyone would politely clap, and say ‘He’s got you down!’

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Carrey says. “But that’s not what I want.”