Jim Carrey Was Once Warned That He Wouldn’t ‘Live Very Long’ if He Kept up His Method Acting
Comedian Jim Carrey is no stranger to method acting. But those around him noticed that the comedian tended to go too far when immersing himself in his roles. So much so that he was cautioned to give up his method acting or else real harm might come his way.
Jim Carrey was warned against method acting when he starred in ‘Me, Myself & Irene’
Carrey has dabbled in dramatic films before like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. but he wanted to truly inhabit his role as Andy Kaufman in the film Man on the Moon. The actor confided that he started becoming the character as soon as he was cast in the role.
“When I heard I had the part, I was looking at the ocean and that’s the moment Andy came back to make his movie,” he once said on the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (via ET Canada).
In a resurfaced interview with Entertainment Weekly, Carrey shared that he wouldn’t even react to his own name while filming the movie. Carrey only acknowledged his character’s name.
“People were never instructed to call me ‘Andy,’ but they’d never get an answer if they called for ‘Jim,’” he said. “I was so deep into it that it was scary for a lot of people around me.”
His next movie to follow his Man on the Moon performance was Me, Myself & Irene. The latter was a complete comedy where Carrey played a state trooper with a split personality. It was a return to form for Carrey, with audiences seeing him in his slapstick comedy roots.
“This was back to not caring,” Carrey said about doing Irene.
But Irene director Peter Farrelly took notice of his method acting in his previous movie. Farrelly made it clear to Carrey that Me, Myself & Irene wouldn’t accommodate that kind of method acting.
“By all accounts, including his own, he’d gone a little nuts,” Farelly said. “So when we hooked up with Jim on Me, Myself & Irene, the first thing we said was, ‘Jim, you should approach this job as a vacation because you’re not going to live very long if you keep becoming these characters. Just have fun on this one.’”
Martin Freeman slammed Jim Carrey’s method acting on ‘Man on the Moon’
Freeman co-starred alongside Carrey in the 1999 biopic, so he witnessed the actor’s transition into Andy Kaufman personally. But Freeman wasn’t a fan of Carrey’s method acting during filming, and called his former co-star out on his behavior.
“For me and I’m sure, genuinely sure Jim Carrey is a lovely and smart person, but it was the most self aggrandizing selfish, f***ing narcissistic, bollocks I’ve ever seen,” Freeman said on the Off Menu podcast. “And the idea that anything in our culture would celebrate that or support it is deranged. I mean, literally deranged?”
Freeman also didn’t seem to agree with the concept of method acting as a whole. Carrey might have highlighted what Freeman believed to be a major flaw in the art.
“You’re not supposed to become the f***ing character. Because you’re supposed to be open to stuff that happens in real life, you know, because somehow at some point, someone’s gonna say cut,” Freeman said. “And it’s no good going, what does cut mean? Because I’m Napoleon. It’s like, shut up man. You know, you need to keep grounded, I think, in reality and that’s not to say that you don’t lose yourself for the time between action and cut, but I think the rest of it is absolute pretentious, nonsense.”
Jim Carrey’s film studio didn’t want footage of his ‘Man on the Moon’ method acting to leak
Carrey’s behavior on the set of Man on the Moon was so distasteful that the public couldn’t see it. The film’s studio believed watching Carrey’s behavior risked tainting the comedian’s image.
“Universal didn’t want the footage we took behind-the-scenes to surface, so that people wouldn’t think I was an a**hole,” Carrey said. “I was thinking, how far should I take this? How far would Andy take it?”
According to The Mask star, he took it so far he had a bit of an identity crisis at the end.
“When the movie was over, I couldn’t remember who I was anymore,” he said.
