One Giant Leap

Jim Carrey loves not being Jim Carrey.

During the making of his new film, “Man on the Moon,” the 37-year-old chameleon completely disappeared into the perplexing character of Andy Kaufman, the comedian and performance artist whose humor was rooted largely in not being funny. On the set, Carrey was Kaufman--except on the days he was Kaufman’s alter ego, a brash, egotistical lounge singer named Tony Clifton. Carrey drove a convertible when he was Tony, a Cordova when he was Andy, and director Milos Forman and everyone else addressed him accordingly. Carrey himself was nowhere to be found.

“I really can say that I never worked with Jim Carrey,” Forman said. “I worked with Andy, Tony, [and Kaufman’s other characters] Latka, Elvis and Foreign Man.”

“The first couple of weeks, Milos didn’t know what to think,” Carrey recalled during a recent interview. “The first time he met Tony he got screamed at. He’d call me at home on the weekends and say, ‘Jim, I am intimidated by Tony. I don’t know how to talk to him.’ I would say, ‘Should we fire him?’ It was weird.”

Perched on a chair in the Brentwood offices of his production company, Pit Bull Productions, Carrey smiled mischievously, relishing talking about himself in the third person. It was so liberating being Kaufman, Carrey said, that when he needed to engage in conversations about his next film (“Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas”) midway through the 85-day “Man on the Moon” shoot, he let Andy speak for him.

“Audrey Geisel [Seuss’ widow] came down to the set of ‘Man on the Moon,’ and Andy did his impression of Jim doing an impression of the Grinch. That’s how I got the part,” Carrey said. “And one day, when I couldn’t be there, Andy called [director] Ron Howard and had a conference with him, going through my notes on the Grinch as best he could. Andy is very cool.”

Confused already? Pace yourself, because Carrey’s connection to the late Kaufman--both in the Universal movie, which opens Dec. 22, and in life--is nothing if not surreal. The fact that both men were born on the same date (Jan. 17) is only the beginning. Among the things they have in common: a brilliant talent for mimicry, developed first in comedy clubs and then on television (Kaufman on “Taxi,” Carrey on “In Living Color”); an offstage persona that can be shy and unsettlingly childlike; an earnest reliance on spirituality to get through the day (Kaufman meditated constantly; Carrey prays “all the time”); and one pair of bongo drums (Carrey owns a pair that were Kaufman’s).

Carrey is, of course, a far bigger star than Kaufman ever was. Since 1994--when “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask” and “Dumb & Dumber” were released to huge public acclaim--he has been one of America’s best-loved big-screen comic talents. He is also among the best-paid: In 1996, he was the first actor to break the $20-million barrier, for the edgy (some would say mean-spirited) comedy “The Cable Guy.” Since then, he has shunned sequels and made some interesting choices: Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” (1998) and now this strange, cerebral take on Kaufman.

“The only way that I can truly dumb down America is to get to the smart people and bring their game down,” Carrey quipped when asked how he picks his roles. “I have this big bin. It’s a bingo thing I got from the church. And I just roll it, [pick one out] and go, ‘OK.’ ”

Don’t be fooled. Carrey’s career is one of the most carefully managed in Hollywood, and his choices are deliberate. Like Kaufman, this former stand-up comedian is driven not just to entertain but also to shock. That’s why he won’t make another “Ace” movie, he said, or a middle-of-the-road romantic comedy.

“I have advisors. We confer on everything,” Carrey said, referring to his brain trust of agent Nick Stevens and managers Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller. “But it all comes down to: Am I going to be able to do something I haven’t done before? Degree of difficulty is important. Is it something that hasn’t been seen? I don’t want to just put out software, you know?”

If his recent roles are any indication, something else also guides Carrey’s on-screen persona: the desire to forget himself. Whether he’s playing Kaufman, the Grinch or a state trooper whose two personalities fall in love with the same woman (in the Farrelly brothers’ upcoming “Me, Myself and Irene”), Carrey likes to dive so deeply into character that he has to be reminded to come up for air.

After “Man on the Moon” wrapped, he admitted, “I spent three weeks thinking, ‘What do I like again? What do I believe? How do I feel about that?’ I had completely let that go. You completely lose yourself. It changes everything.”

He paused, then added with a grin: “Not that I didn’t enjoy it.”

*

“Andy Lives!” proclaim the brightly colored posters that have popped up mysteriously on street corners around the country as “Man on the Moon’s” release date nears.

But Kaufman devotees--and they’re still out there--didn’t need a movie to make them think he was immortal. Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, at age 35. But at the time, many who knew him (or who merely followed his prank-filled career) thought it was a gag. Some still do.

“When I found out he was sick, [my wife] Rhea [Perlman] and I both went, ‘This is Andy. It’s not true.’ I wouldn’t buy it,” said Danny DeVito, who became a close friend of Kaufman when they did “Taxi” together. “Then, he passed--or so they said. We went to the memorial service, and [a videotaped] Andy spoke to us. We thought, ‘Any minute now, Mr. Wise Guy is going to walk out here.’ ”

Even after DeVito’s production company, Jersey Films, set out to make the Kaufman movie five years ago, and even after DeVito decided to be in it (playing Kaufman’s manager George Shapiro), he said, “I always had this strange feeling that I was being set up--that Andy was in cahoots with Milos. . . . Even now, I wonder sometimes. I want it so much. Wouldn’t it be so great if [he showed up] at the premiere?”

In Kaufman circles, this through-the-looking-glass view of life is the norm. What is real resembles what is not, and sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. In Kaufman’s stand-up act, for example, he appeared as Foreign Man--a nervous, unfunny and heavily accented nebbish who was always on the verge of flopping. Then, just when he seemed to be dying onstage, he’d transform himself into Elvis, curling his lip, slicking his hair and letting loose with a spot-on impersonation of the King.

“Tenk you vedy much,” Kaufman’s Foreign Man would say when he finished a Presley song. Then he’d shuffle offstage, leaving his audience to wonder: Who was the real Andy Kaufman? Is there a real Andy Kaufman?

Split personalities, deceptive disguises, mistaken and muddled identities--all were part of the Kaufman mystique. Can it be any surprise that of all the A-list actors who wanted to play Kaufman--people like Ed Norton, Kevin Spacey, Nic Cage--the part eventually went to Hollywood’s master of make-believe?

Remember how the elastic-faced Carrey morphed into the Riddler in 1995’s “Batman Forever”? While his star turn in “The Truman Show” displayed his more contemplative side, Carrey is still one of very few actors in town whom anyone can imagine, for example, credibly portraying a fish (he was slated to do so in the now-shelved remake of “The Incredible Mr. Limpet”). The role of Kaufman, of course, was human. But his sensibility was so otherworldly that he might as well have been another species. The actor who played him had to be more than merely talented. He had to “get” Kaufman. And from the start, it was apparent that Carrey did.

“Jim was literally born to play this role,” said Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s closest friend and a co-executive producer on the film, who first met Carrey when the actor asked for feedback on a videotape of himself “doing” Kaufman. “Before he showed it to Milos, he wanted to show it to me. I drove over to his house and he put the tape in. About a minute into it, I started crying like a baby. If I hadn’t known, I would have thought it was Andy. And this was before makeup, costume and hair.”

Forman, who asked all the contenders to make tapes showing “how they see themselves as Andy,” was similarly wowed.

“I knew that Jim could do all the comedy wonderfully. But I was very impressed with the non-comedic, human side of the character. And the physical resemblance was spooky,” the director said. “Every performer has a fear of failing. Andy’s brilliance was that he conquered that fear by including failure in his act. . . . The whole world was a stage for Andy, and in some way, Jim is the same. But Andy absolutely never stepped off the stage.”

Carrey had been a Kaufman fan, but once he had the role, he became an acolyte. He watched and re-watched Kaufman’s routines, many that had appeared on “Saturday Night Live.” He spent hours and hours talking with Zmuda and the real George Shapiro, “downloading us,” Zmuda said, “for months on end.” By the time shooting began in July 1998, he had nailed not only the physical mannerisms, but the key to the film: staying in character.

The result was unsettling to those who knew Kaufman, many of whom--including wrestler Jerry Lawler, David Letterman, Lorne Michaels and the cast members of “Taxi”--play themselves in the movie.

“There are a lot of unresolved things when somebody dies that young, so it was one big psychodrama [on the set]. And 21 days into the shoot, Jim began to exhibit Kaufman-esque behavior that none of us had told him about,” Zmuda said. For example, Carrey suddenly started avoiding cracks in the sidewalk--just as Kaufman had done. “Some said he was channeling. . . . It was very bizarre and very unnerving, but ‘Andy’ walked onto that set as if a day had not gone by since he died 15 years ago. He picked up exactly where Andy had left off.”

Kaufman’s parents apparently felt the same way.

“His family treated me like Andy,” Carrey recalled. “It was bizarre at times. I had heart-to-hearts with [his dad] Stanley Kaufman. [His mom] Carol Kaufman sent me a letter saying, ‘We knew what Andy was like until 1983 and now we know what he’s like now.’ It just gave them the feeling that he was there, you know, hanging out. It was gratifying and frightening and weird and wonderful. Wonderful.”

Hanging out with Kaufman, however, also meant putting up with his alter ego, Tony Clifton. And that was trying at times. Carrey as Clifton picked fights with the same actors Clifton had clashed with years before on the “Taxi” set. He threw tantrums, behaving so rudely that he once was thrown out of the commissary on the Universal lot. And he smelled so bad that Forman assigned a crew member to follow him around with a fan, blowing the stench away from the other actors.

“Tony had manufactured this smell by getting Limburger cheese and rubbing it over every inch of his body and his hands,” said Zmuda, who with Lynn Margulies, Kaufman’s girlfriend, captured this incident and many others on film for a behind-the-scenes documentary on Carrey’s transformation. “All the crew guys loved him, because any time an executive would come to the set from the [Universal Pictures] black tower, Tony would shake his hand and hug him. Everybody knew Tony was cheesing him.”

One day, Clifton got mad that DeVito’s trailer was bigger than his. The next day, DeVito’s trailer began emitting a horribly familiar odor. Limburger cheese and sliced salami were soon discovered smeared under a mattress.

“You’d have to deal with Andy totally different than Tony. Tony was very volatile,” DeVito recalled. “He’s not an actor. He’s a lounge singer. He should stick to abusing people in Vegas and not even think about acting.”

DeVito paused, weighing the cost of such frankness. “If you write this and he reads it,” he predicted, “I’m going to get a phone call.”

DeVito could be right. “Tony was really tough to shake,” Carrey admitted. “Tony Clifton taught me that you won’t necessarily lose your life, your friends, everything you have if you’re honest. You know?”

*

There’s a famous story about Jim Carrey, sitting in his aging Toyota on Mulholland Drive and willing himself to be famous. “I am one of the top five actors,” he said, repeating an affirmation he hoped someday would come true. “Every director who’s worth their salt wants to work with me. I have the best scripts in town offered to me.” He then wrote himself a $10-million check inscribed: “For acting services rendered.”

Carrey postdated the check, Thanksgiving 1995. And by the time that date rolled around, surreally, he’d succeeded: His payday for “Dumb & Dumber” was $7 million.

The story is strikingly Kaufman-like. Like Carrey, Kaufman placed great faith in the powers of visualization (especially after he used them, successfully, to accomplish his fondest wish: meeting Elvis). Like Carrey, Kaufman wanted very much to be famous but struggled with fame’s impositions. Kaufman, who was known to most Americans as his Latka Gravas character from “Taxi,” chafed when audiences at his live shows demanded Latka. Carrey knows how he felt.

“For Robin Williams, it was ‘Na nu, na nu.’ For me, it’s ‘Alrighty then!’ People stop me on the street and ask me to do characters. They say, ‘Be the Mask.’ I just never do it. Never,” he said. “I like people. I guess I just don’t like the idea of people feeling like they have to have something from you. I like to say, ‘Hi.’ It feels like that should be enough to me.”

Fame, Carrey says, is a dodecahedron--many, many sided.

“I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.’ You can get complacent and used to anything,” he said. “You’ve got to remind yourself that, yeah, it’s a bit of a cage. But it’s a beautiful cage, you know?”

The story of Carrey’s financially precarious Toronto childhood has also been told many a time: how his father lost his accounting job at age 51, how the entire family ended up taking janitorial work, how they ended up homeless. As Carrey himself summed it up in a recent Vanity Fair article: “Living in a van, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It can’t be talked about anymore. It’s so frickin’ boring.”

But those beginnings still shape Carrey’s outlook. He confesses he wonders sometimes whether he deserves what he’s got. And he relies, he says, on a connection with God to keep him both mentally healthy and humble.

“I’ve always talked to Him. And it always makes me feel better, without fail. Whenever I’m connected, I’m not alone,” he said. “I can ask myself a question in my head and then the answer is at the next table in two words that the person says behind me. Certain things like that I listen to. I’m not a space cadet or anything.”

But he was starting to fear he sounded like one. Asked whether he follows any prayer rituals, he couldn’t help but tease: “At night! I drag a goat onto the tennis court. Under the moon!

“I’m constantly at odds with what you acquire in life and, you know, whether you deserve that much,” he said. “My karma is immediate. I can feel it coming on like a fever. I call it ‘Eugene syndrome.’ My middle name is Eugene, and I always felt like my parents gave me that name to keep me grounded. Try to be too cool, and the universe will show everyone around you how uncool you are. Somebody will come by and go, ‘Your middle name’s Eugene. Shut up.’ ”

So Carrey doesn’t take anything for granted. He is known as a perfectionist on a movie set. On “The Grinch,” which is shooting now, he is reluctant to let his body doubles stand in for him, even at minor moments, because they can’t precisely ape his physicality. Peter Farrelly, who directed “Me, Myself and Irene” with his brother Bobby, recalled, “He’d call me at 1 a.m. about a very minor line in the next day’s scene. He’s the most prepared person on the set, including us.”

Peter Farrelly said he encouraged Carrey to look at “Me, Myself and Irene” (which began shooting not long after “Man on the Moon” wrapped) as a vacation.

“When he did his Andy Kaufman thing, by all accounts he basically lost his mind for a while. And I think Jim could do that for any role--if Jim really decided to do Al Pacino, he could do it better than anyone on the planet,” the director said. “But it’s the type of thing he can only do a few more times in his life, because it’ll kill him. He came out of it reeling. So our approach with him was, ‘Just have a good time, don’t get worked up.’ ”

Carrey listened--to a point.

“He approaches every movie like this is the movie he will be remembered for for the rest of his life. He never goes lightly into it,” Peter Farrelly said. “He wants desperately to succeed with each part because he is more in the moment here on this planet when he’s in character. He took a year off [from acting] before Andy, after the breakup of his marriage [to actress Lauren Holly]. He told me [the vacation] was the biggest mistake he’s ever made. He can’t be with himself unless he’s in somebody else. He’s never more alive than when he’s someone else.”

Carrey acknowledged that struggle.

“I have dual things going on. You know, when you think about your life, you go, ‘This is what I don’t like about myself and this is what I do.’ We all have a couple of people who are fighting each other, you know?” he said, suddenly riffing: “He’s split-personality guy! He laughs at his own jokes. He has his own talk show where he’s his own sidekick!”

Then, just as suddenly, the earnest Carrey was back.

“I think a lot of times as an artist you project an image that you want to be. Or some aspect--confident or sure of yourself--well, that’s the same thing, isn’t it?” he asked, laughing. “You project an ideal of some kind. And they’re impossible to live up to.”

*

Carrey went to Alaska two years ago and encountered a grizzly bear. The stark realization that he could be a mammal’s lunch was frightening, he said, but also freeing. He savors the memory.

“It was 30 yards away from me, just circling, out in the open. And we had no gun because the guide believed bears are so smart that they sense the aggressive energy. So we were just vocalizing, ‘Hi, bear! Hey, bear!’ ” he said. “I’m standing there in front of this grizzly and he’s chewing the grass. I felt completely free. I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, if you go now, what a way to go.’ . . . I wasn’t Jim Carrey that day. You know what I mean? I was no one important that day.”

Carrey positively glows when he tells this story, though he admits that even at the time, it dawned on him that the fact that he actually was Jim Carrey would probably make his mauling front-page news.

“The guide and my friend were behind me videotaping me,” he said. “So I was standing there thinking, ‘Ace Ventura mauled by a grizzly,’ with footage on every show of me beating on the bear as he plays double Dutch with my entrails.”

When you’re very famous, Carrey seemed to be saying, even the great equalizer--Mother Nature--treats you differently.

Peter Farrelly said that this is part of why he thinks Carrey takes refuge in other people’s identities: because it’s the only time people don’t make a fuss over him. “When he’s in character,” Farrelly said, “he’s left alone,” even when the characters are getting noticed.

Carrey says he doesn’t miss doing stand-up (“I think 15 years in the comedy clubs is a PhD of some kind,” he said), but he admits he has other outlets now that allow him to act up in front of people: awards shows.

At this year’s MTV Movie Awards, for example, he dressed up like a ‘60s rocker (longhaired wig, beard, wire-rimmed shades) and accepted his best male performance statuette in character. “I didn’t see much of a [expletive] cheer when my name went up there,” he groused, Clifton-like, at the beginning of a profanity-laced acceptance speech. Later, he told the Hollywood Reporter that his “alternate biker personality” had been triggered by his snub at the Academy Awards.

Carrey was not nominated for an Oscar this year for his performance in “The Truman Show”--a fact he managed to work, hilariously, into his speech this year as an Oscar presenter (“Winning the Oscar is not the most important thing in the world,” he said before he handed out the statuette for film editing. “It’s an honor just to be nom . . . Oh God!”).

He has riffed on the snub off and on ever since. In the November issue of Vanity Fair, he sounded a bit bitter, calling the Oscar race a “monkey dance” and saying that as wonderful as it would be to get an award, he doesn’t want to run the “gauntlet” necessary to do so. But in October, during a photo session to accompany this article, he was more playful. When the photographer positioned him against a wall in his office, he pointed overhead and joked, “Can you put a sign up there: ‘Oscar Headquarters’?”

In an indirect way, the Grinch offers some insight here. Carrey said that initially, he thought he’d approach the character as “just the guy who hated the Who’s. But then because of things I went through--I went to Hawaii for a vacation and I was mad at stuff, and suddenly I was layin’ back one day and realized that I wasn’t angry, I was hurt. And it became clear to me that the reason the audience will love the Grinch is because he’s not an angry guy. He’s a hurt guy. . . . It’s so relaxing to go, ‘Oh, wait, I’m just hurt. Oh, OK.’ You can deal with that. It’s not war, you know. It’s just healing.

“I don’t think anybody is interesting to look at or to listen to unless they’ve had their heart broken, you know?” he said later. “Especially funny people. Because getting over that or getting through the challenges of life are what make you either your own hero or the villain or whatever. I mean that you weren’t beat by it.”

Which may be the single best explanation for Carrey’s affinity for Kaufman, who didn’t even let death get him down.

“In a way, he beat death. He really did. I mean, people still don’t know. I love that he left it like that,” Carrey said. “It’s a triumph.”