Weekend with Jim Carrey

Defying the laws of gravity

For 40-something superstar Jim Carrey, Rule 1 is: Never let them see the real you. Rule 2: Grow up! It's time to forget Rule 1.

By Mark Lasswell

An actor with his success who still madly covets an Oscar is like "a hog at a banquet."

Haven't we met before? You look familiar." Jim Carrey is smiling and offering his hand. He pauses for a half-second while you wonder whether you've somehow forgotten meeting the actor who raised the big-star salary bar to $20 million per picture, then says, "Must have been on 'America's Most Wanted'." It's an unashamedly lame joke, the sort of teasing jab that precedes a lot of chortling and backslapping in countless corner taverns. And, indeed, although Carrey is famous for his epic face-pulling, a head full of lunatic voices and a preternatural drive to do anything for a laugh, you get the idea his default comic setting is closer to that of a chronically wisecracking uncle.

Chronic, but not constant. When Carrey's not trolling for laughs, he's so earnestly tapping into his emotional life ("I'm in a very grateful place," he says) that sometimes you long for Ace Ventura to pop up and throttle him. But another, unfamiliar side is revealed when he talks now: the grown-up Jim Carrey.

Carrey doesn't speak to the press very often, particularly not in the past few years, after his 2001 Hollywood blacklisting movie "The Majestic" got blacklisted by moviegoers and the media began taking more interest in his private life than in his career (the latest tidbit being his ex-wife's demand to increase the $10,000 a month in child support Carrey had paid for their 15-year-old daughter, Jane). It's not because he hates doing interviews. Rather, it's because he likes them too much. As Carrey himself once observed, he tends to turns them into therapy sessions. To wit: "I used to spend a lot of time in interviews being really angry at my parents," he says.

This particular Carrey confessional took place in a spacious private room at the Fiamma Osteria, a sleek Soho restaurant in New York. He chose the site because it was familiar: He'd recently spent several long days there rehearsing with Kate Winslet for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", a low-budget, dark romantic comedy due out in November. That quirky project, from the off-kilter mind of "Adaptation" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is a long way from the ostensible reason for this interview: for Carrey to promote his newest movie, "Bruce Almighty", the comedy that opens this weekend. The problem is that we spend so much time talking about everything except "Bruce" that Carrey guiltily calls the next day -- in a universe ruled by publicists, unsolicited calls from major stars to reporters' homes are almost unthinkable -- to make sure he's on the record raving about co-star Jennifer Aniston ("totally cool") and everyone else he worked with.

"It's really fun when you find someone who has good chemistry and it's a pleasure to go to work," he says of Aniston, adding, without naming names, "and you don't have to deal with a monster."

Carrey is that rare well-known actor who's taller in person than expected: He's comfortably over 6 feet. He's decked out in a blue T-shirt with a karate-kicker logo, jeans, a mop of brown hair under a stocking cap and a few days' growth of beard. With that look, plus his skinny frame, the 41-year-old easily could pass for a 30-year-old alt-rocker, if it weren't for the crow's-feet that break out when he smiles. But looks can be deceiving. "I'm not the wild man I once was," Carrey says.

Turning 40 has a way of doing that. So does being the father of a teenager. Carrey talks adoringly about daughter Jane. "One thing that I've matured in is that I've realized how good it is that she's such a sharp human being," he says. "We have a blast together. That, to me, will be the thing that counts." (Winslet, his "Sunshine" co-star, says: "It's interesting to sit with them when they're in that father-daughter state. It's like, Jim Carrey -- after all those things, $20 million-dollar man, whatever -- is a regular dad who really cares about his kid.") Jane is from Carrey's first marriage, to actress Melissa Womer, which ended after six years in 1993. There was also a mid-'90s roller-coaster relationship with his "Dumb and Dumber" co-star Lauren Holly, which included less than a year of marriage, followed by a romance with Renée Zellweger, his co-star in the 2000 comedy "Me, Myself & Irene", and plenty of tomcatting. On a practical level, turning into an adult has required Carrey to adjust his attitude toward women. He used to think that "it was OK to sleep with someone and never call them again," he says. "But I can't live like that anymore."

In a more general way, Carrey has achieved some sort of peace with the torments that so often are the flip side of the manic need to entertain that drives so many comedians. "The highs are not so high, and the lows are not so low," says Tom Shadyac, who directed his pal Carrey in "Bruce Almighty" as well as "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Liar Liar". "There's an evenness to Jim's life now."

Part of the mellowing -- still a relative term for this kinetic star -- applies to his attitude about his past. Carrey's father, an accountant who died in 1994, and his often-ailing mother, who died in 1991, came to rely on his earnings when Carrey launched a career as a teenage stand-up comedian in Toronto when his dad was unemployed. As an adult looking back on a childhood spent, in part, as the breadwinner for a family of six, Carrey resented his parents' "putting so much responsibility on me so early." Now, he says, "The way I look at it is, 'This much they did wrong, and this much they did right' " -- specifically, their support for his comedy dreams. "They always told me I was funny, not stupid."

Carrey's adolescence was not so much stolen as deferred: What are the "Ace Ventura" movies, "The Mask" and "Dumb and Dumber" if not a teenager's multimillion-dollar daydreams? But just as Carrey the performer has started maturing in recent years with serious fare such as "The Truman Show" and "The Majestic" and comedies with a semblance of a message ("Liar Liar": "Parents, don't B.S. your kids"), so has Carrey grown up personally. "I've done enough thinking for five lifetimes," he says. "I want to work and lay some things down that mean something to me."

Carrey's slate of upcoming roles -- including the scheming Count Olaf in a movie version of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" children's books and, tentatively, Howard Hughes in a biopic -- might mean something to him but risks further clouding precisely what Jim Carrey means to movie audiences. "People" magazine movie critic Leah Rozen says the actor "is to be applauded" for venturing beyond the slapstick that made him famous, but, she cautions, "There's no fixed persona for him, and I think that makes it somewhat difficult for a long-term career as a big, iconic movie star." Carrey says his agenda is simply "to make sure people never get bored with me."

Hollywood kibitzers like to speculate that Carrey casts such a wide net in an endless quest for his first Academy Award. But he shrugs off the supposed Oscar obsession and calls acting a "ridiculous way of making a living." For this star, coveting an Oscar would be like "being a hog at a banquet." Actually winning one? "If it happens, great."

Carrey may have been late in arriving at such a grown-up approach to life, but these days the comedian seems to have it aced.

Mark Lasswell is a freelance writer who lives in New York.

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Weekend with ... Jim Carrey

Carrey gravitates toward the beach on weekends, but until last year he hadn't actually bought an oceanside home. He rented beach houses regularly and even darted to Hawaii several times for weekend R&R. ("You get off the plane and the warm wind takes your troubles into the ocean. It's beautiful.") Then last fall Carrey decided, "Why waste all this money renting?" -- and reportedly dropped about $9.5 million for a place on the water in Malibu. He acts a little sheepish about maintaining such a lavish getaway ("I know it sounds sick, really ill") and insists the place doubles as a vacation home for his extended family.

When he's in residence, a typical weekend includes reading three scripts and running 8 miles a day, on the beach, in Malibu proper or at home on a treadmill that faces the Pacific. "I love the ocean," Carrey says. "I love being near the source of life. I imagine myself crawling out of the surf with fins." It sounds like sappy Malibuspeak, except that when Jim Carrey says it, he instantly turns his hands into flippers coming out of his rib cage, makes a face like a fledgling amphibian and nearly flops across the table in pursuit of a laugh.
-- M.L.

Photography by George Lange for USA WEEKEND
Styling by Alyssa Dineen. Grooming by Cohl Katz. Wall by Miranda Lloyd.
Clothing: Cover -- Shirt by J. Lindeberg, jacket by New York Industrie, pants by Banana Republic. Above -- Shirt by Etro, pants by Banana Republic, shoes by Marc Jacobs.