Once Bitten interview: Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey, star of Once Bitten, has a message for audiences everywhere. “If people go and see this movie,” he says, “it won’t change their lives. But it will change mine.”

He’s  probably right on both counts. Once Bitten is the young actor’s  first big shot, a leading role in which he gives an assured comic performance, and his stock will rise if it clicks at the box-office. Carrey was in Seattle this week promoting the film, and he described the steady rise of his career – from popular stand-up comic in Canada (he was born and raised near Toronto) to leading man in a major studio film.

He was making a lucrative living a couple of years ago as an energetic, rubber-faced impressionist-comic on the Canadian circuit. “But I was doing the same thing over and over,” Carrey says. “When people start saying your punch lines, it’s time to move on. I got real panicky and left town – burned all my bridges.”

He went to Los Angeles and found steady work at a comedy club, then got a role on a short-lived NBC sitcom: The Duck Factory. He did his stand-up routine on The Tonight Show, and had a small role in Richard Lester’s Finders Keepers, when he came to the attention of producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., who had a project called Once Bitten.

“Samuel Goldwyn wanted me in,” Carrey said, ”because he had seen me do my stand-up. So he asked me to read for the part. He was really behind me the whole time.” Carrey says he  got on well with director Howard Storm – possibly because, having directed many episodes of Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy, Storm was accustomed to creative actors. “He was pretty open to me fiddling about,” Carrey says. “Plus, he’s a total freako.”

Carrey’s just completed another role in a major film: Peggy Sue Got Married, opposite Kathleen Turner, directed by Francis Coppola. “I’m like the comedy relief,” he says of the new film, which will be released in 1986. “It’s one of those neat little parts in a movie that kind shine. Hopefully.”

Working with Coppola was one of the reasons Carrey took the part: “You know how many people get to do that in a lifetime?” Coppola, he says, is “just like a lovable, roly-poly guy, although he’s sort of tough to figure out.”

Now, Carrey is trying to keep busy between movie projects. He may do more stand-up comedy – “I want to live out the end of the world onstage,” he insists – and by writing and eveloping his own scripts. “I get sent scripts, and I read a lot of crap. I don’t want to just jump on anything now.”

For all his exuberance, Carrey seems unusually thoughtful and ambitious for a young Hollywood actor. “I’ve always wanted to do everything. I guess the logical thing to do would be to direct and write my own things.”

Carrey says that he’s not always sure what form his creative energy is going to take. “Sometimes I sit down to write a joke,” he says, “and I wind up writing a poem.”

See, Carrey is different – how many members of the Brat Pack have claimed poetry-writing as an avocation recently?

First published in The Herald, November 1985

I had an hour to sit around and talk with this ingratiating (and completely unknown to me) person, the kind of time interviewers stopped getting 20 years ago. I must say he came across as completely authentic and honest, and game to talk about a lot of subjects, which was good because it meant we didn’t have to talk about the movie. “I want to live out the end of the world onstage” – I wish I could remember the rest of that part of the conversation.