By now, seeing a comedian try to go serious should be no surprise to anyone. Robin Williams and Tom Hanks are Oscar winners. Jim Carrey keeps trying for the same luck, with the occasional Majestic and Eternal Sunshine interspersed with his Bruce Almightys and Lemony Snickets.
But The Number 23 may feature his darkest role. While previous straight men have been generally good guys, this one shows him going into double madness. Carrey plays Walter, a family man who becomes obsessed with a book called “The Number 23.” In the world of the book, Carrey plays Fingerling, a hard boiled detective who discovers a phenomenon where everything adds up to 23. Walter starts seeing it everywhere too and uncovers dark secrets of his own past. No talking butt cheeks in this one.
Carrey always keeps things light for the public though. Even talking with Hollywood.com about a dark movie, he drops voices and anecdotes. So if you’re sad to see Ace Ventura do drama, at least the real Jim Carrey still has a sense of humor.
Hollywood.com: You called your production company JC23 before you even started this movie, so you were already obsessing about it?
Jim Carrey: A friend of mine in Canada kind of handed it down to me. He was seeing it everywhere, added up license plates, doing all these things, he had a book full of 23 phenomenon and he handed it to me, and I said he was crazy and then I started seeing it everywhere. And then one day, a few years later after it had entered my life in a big way and I was driving my friends crazy, somebody handed me the 23rd Psalm, living without fear basically, knowing you’re taken care of, so I thought that was great progression from Pit Bull productions, which is kind of like grabbing hold of life and just not letting it go, to not sweating it. So I named the company that, and then I explained it to a friend and he said, “Well, I just read script called The Number 23. And I said, ‘I have to see this.’” And I read the script, I was compelled by it, and I was freaked out actually because the first page of the script was actually originally me trying to capture a pit bull, the [irony that I’d gone from] Pit Bull Productions to JC23 was not lost there. And it went on like that. Then a friend read it and he had turned to the 23rd page and was circling every 23rd word. He was looking for a code. And that’s what I want to do with the audience with a movie like this, that’s the fun of it.
HW: Are you still looking for those 23s?
JC: Here is an example of something. I’m on the Internet, IMing somebody, a friend of mine about changing the name of my company to JC23 and why I did it, about the valley of the shadow of death. At that very moment I typed those words a friend walks in with a newspaper that on the front page is a giant picture of Death Valley that says, “Death Valley Blooms” and Death Valley was blooming for the first time in 100 years because of that extraordinary amount of rain we had that year. And these seeds had been lying dormant for 100 years and suddenly it was all flowers. And he was like, “We gotta go on a motorcycle trip, man.” And I was like, “Here we go. It’s lead me on some strange journey again.” So we got on the motorcycles, did a three-day trip to Death Valley and came back. The day we got back the Pope died at 2:37 eastern standard time. 23 which is the valley of the shadow of death and 7, which is the number of completion in the bible. Everything is based on 7 in the bible. Starts and ends with 7.
HW: Are you going to start doing more intense dramatic movies now instead of comedies?
JC: Well, you know, I really have always thought of myself as somebody who lives in the middle of the wheel and is able to go to the extreme, to the outside of the wheel in any direction. So the best case scenario for me is to be able to be centered and then go out and you can be zany and funny or you can do something that really has some depth to it and serious. So there’s many different colors to paint with, and I would hate to get trapped in one little thing. I always feel like funny is an appendage, but it is not my whole body.
HW: Do you worry your fans get mad when you don’t give them the laughs?
JC: [Sings] “Love me as I am.” The one thing that I’m really proud of is that I love people and I want them to enjoy the work absolutely without question. But I believe in the thing that Emerson says in Essay on Self-Reliance about what’s true for you is true for all men. And so, I try to do things that actually connect with things, and whether they’re comedy or drama or any of those things, I don’t consider patronizing the audience. I consider what’s true for me and I know if it’s really true for me it will connect with someone. In many cases it will connect with a great many people. That’s all I really consider.
HW: Has getting older made you more introspective?
JC: I always have been introspective, since I was a little kid. Since I could remember, I was sitting in a closet trying to write out the meaning of the universe. That’s been my whole life.
HW: Being in a positive relationship with Jenny McCarthy, do you feel closer to that good place you’re trying to get to?
JC: I feel that our relationship happened at a time that I am more ready than I have ever been in my life to have a relationship. And we also encourage each other and we’re also on the same path.
HW: Hamilton Ontario Canada is 23 keystrokes on a computer. Would you go back?
JC: Absolutely. Tomorrow. 23 is not necessarily a bad thing. Hamilton is a good thing. It’s a good town. It’s a tough town, steel town.
HW: What do you remember about growing up there?
JC: That and good people. I had a great time. I lived in Burlington for about eight years right across the bay. And I basically thought I was going to be working in Dofasco. If the career in show business hadn’t panned out I was looking for a job in one of the steel mills, because those were the great jobs.
HW: That was your backup plan?
JC: I still have one. I worked in Richmond Hill in a lot of the factories there and in many different factory jobs. So, I was kind of headed in that direction.
HW: What’s the funniest movie you’ve seen?
JC: A lot of funny movies. I mean, A Shot in the Dark with Peter Sellers was a genius comedy because it went all over the place. It was not only character funny, it was intellectually funny and physically hilarious, always it kept you off-guard. I think that’s a genius movie. And the genius around him as well with the other actors, you know, all of that. So, that was one of my favorites and one of my kind of modern favorites was Richard E. Grant in How to Get a Head in Advertising. He was brilliant in that movie. Really brilliant, oh, so funny.
HW: What’s a blockbuster you loved?
JC: Jaws was one of my favorites, absolutely. That was just a great Moby Dick and I just thought it was brilliant. It captured me. It made me laugh and then scared me at the same time.
HW: What are you doing next?
JC: Well, I’m working on Ripley’s Believe It or Not with Tim Burton. It’s going to be really fun. And, at the moment, I’m doing the cartoon version of Horton Hears a Who, which is going to be beautiful. I have always loved all Dr. Seuss, and I’m lucky enough to have been the Grinch, and Audrey Geisel, Dr. Seuss’ widow, liked what I did and she asked me to do Horton. And I love that idea that a person is a person no matter how small and the idea of worlds within worlds within worlds. Because, sometimes I sit out in my backyard and I look at the birds, and a hummingbird will come down, WAP, goes flying past my head and will threaten me and stuff like that and I realize that he has no respect for my deed to the land, you know? That’s his property as far as he’s concerned. And that’s just the reality, we think that we’re the ones in control, everybody does.
HW: Are you going to have to do crazy things for Ripley‘s
JC: Crazy things? Yeah, it’s going to be wonderful. It’s just an incredible world to open up. [Ripley] was very much the champion of the underdog and people who were a little bit different and freakish. He was about celebrating life. He was about proving its special-ness. F inancing never went away. We just got kind of close to going into production and I just felt like the script wasn’t quite where it could have been. I had a lot of ideas that would have facilitated a change in plan, a change of approach to the production of it so I just thought it could be more than it was. I think it’ll ready at the beginning of 2008. Probably.
