A Darker, Deeper Jim Carrey Returns to TV With ‘Kidding’

CULVER CITY, Calif. — Jim Carrey was harder to locate than it seemed.

Yes, the lanky guy with the dopey, chin-length bob haircut wearing a pair of hand puppets shaped like anthropomorphic sandwiches in sunglasses looked very much the actor we know. He was filming a scene here at Sony Pictures Studios for his new Showtime series, “Kidding” — his first regular television role since his heyday on “In Living Color,” and his first acting work of any kind in a couple of years — which casts him as Jeff Pickles, a Mister Rogers-like children’s-TV host whose personal life is in free-fall.

In this sequence, on this July morning, Carrey was trying to get a laugh out of his young co-star Cole Allen, who plays both of Pickles’ twin sons. Carrey operated one of the puppets while speaking in a goofy voice, as if his tongue were stuck to the roof of his mouth. Then he switched to a serpentine hiss, reminiscent of his manic character in “The Mask”: “Ssss-s-s-savory!”

Like his best-known performances — his hit comedies like “Dumb and Dumber,” as well as later serious efforts like “The Truman Show” — this one had all the classic Carrey elements: It was antic and inventive, with an undercurrent of desperation to be liked.

But beneath the buoyancy, there was a palpable melancholy, hinting at the vein of sorrow that runs throughout “Kidding.” Just as his character relies on his puppets to say the things that he cannot, Carrey is using the show as a vehicle to express urgent feelings that he can’t otherwise get across. The series is one of the darkest things Carrey has made, and he is grappling with some dark emotions right now.

As viewers will learn about Jeff Pickles, he is a beloved entertainer discovering that his philosophy of kindness and tolerance may not be enough to sustain him in a world that is often tragic and downright hostile. It’s not a stretch to wonder how much of that might also apply to the man portraying him.

But there’s a crucial difference between them: If Jeff Pickles isn’t sure who he is anymore, Carrey is quite certain that he isn’t anybody.

When I asked him later that day if he thought he was experiencing an existential crisis, he answered me, calmly and with supreme confidence: “I don’t have a crisis anymore. I know I don’t exist.”

This is not the story of an actor who lost himself in a role and forgot where the boundaries were between his character and himself. This is about a performer who wanted to get lost entirely and perhaps still isn’t sure if he wants to come back at all.

On his lunch break, Carrey invited me into his trailer. The room was dim except for the light coming off the graphical tablet he uses to create some of the political cartoons that are occasionally posted on his Twitter account: jagged drawings of, say, a Russian flag planted in President Donald Trump. The artwork is one of the only things Carrey has created for public consumption recently, and he described the undertaking as if it were a patriotic obligation.

“The last few years, it’s become essential,” he said. “It’s like going into the army in Israel. Something needs protecting and you’re going to do it — you have to.” (More on this subject later.)

It’s “Kidding,” which debuts Sunday, that Carrey said he regards as “the first thing I’ve done since I quit the business.” Not that he ever officially submitted a resignation letter to Hollywood. “I mean, in my head,” he said. “I struggled for a few years with the idea of, OK, what now? You get to it sooner or later, if you accomplish a lot of stuff.”

Should you need reminding, Carrey’s past accomplishments are quite staggering. Beginning with his breakout 1994 feature “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” he starred in a series of blockbuster comedies (peaking commercially with “Bruce Almighty,” a $242 million hit in 2003) and family movies (a roster topped by “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which grossed $260 million in 2000).

He also made a credible crossover into serious fare like “Man on the Moon,” Milos Forman’s 1999 biopic about Andy Kaufman. Like that film’s subject, Carrey seemed as if he could pop up anywhere; he was perpetually dancing on the border between inspired and aggravating.

Carrey reached a kind of creative zenith playing an angst-ridden Everyman in the inventive 2004 romantic comedy “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” directed by Michel Gondry, with whom he reunites on “Kidding.”

But lately Carrey’s creative output has slowed to a trickle. Since 2011, he has appeared in six movies, garnering the most attention for the lackluster “Dumb and Dumber” sequel in 2014. Since then he’s made only a couple of little-seen, low-budget films you probably weren’t even aware of: “The Bad Batch,” which grossed about $180,000 at its release in 2017, and “Dark Crimes,” which opened this past May and holds a zero percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

His deceleration, Carrey said, was his choice while he re-examined “my place in the status-phere.” As he put it, “What motivates me now, when I don’t have ‘getting rich’ to hold up in front of me, or ‘getting famous’ to hold up in front of me?”

Filmmaker Judd Apatow, a longtime friend who produced Carrey’s 1996 comedy “The Cable Guy” and helped write his 2005 film “Fun With Dick and Jane,” said Carrey’s professional trajectory illustrates how “everything changes when all of your dreams come true.”

“No one can totally relate to what he went through in his career,” Apatow said. Carrey sees his circumstances in slightly different terms. Comparing himself to his character at the end of “The Truman Show,” as he wrestles with the choice between comfortable captivity and dangerous freedom, he said, “Instead of being the guy who just walks through the door, I was sitting in front of it and not walking through it.”

Carrey is 56 now, with a face that’s more lined than it was in the Ace Ventura era but no less expressive. He can still twist it into the contorted countenance of the Grinch when he wants to elicit a laugh.

But he’s not always prone to whimsical moods. He can be effortlessly funny in one moment and unexpectedly intense in the next. When he talked about himself it was often at a distance, using a tangled vocabulary of self-actualization metaphors. In these moments, he would speak with a straight face and in an even tone; I would nod as if I grasped what he meant. And when I later listened to his words, I realized I didn’t understand him at all.

As he told me in one such instance: “I see what is presented to me on a little screen. That works within the boundaries of that proscenium. I’m the whole thing, man. I’m the theater, not the proscenium. So when I remember that, I’m free.”

In 2015, Carrey’s former girlfriend Cathriona White, a makeup artist, died from an overdose of multiple prescription drugs; a coroner would later rule her death a suicide. The following year, Carrey was sued for wrongful death by White’s estranged husband and her mother, who alleged among other charges that Carrey had used a false name to help obtain these drugs for White.

Carrey filed a countersuit that said he was a victim of a “cottage industry that both feeds upon and exploits the public vulnerability of those who have achieved Hollywood notoriety.” It got uglier still: A suicide note written by White was published in the news media, and Carrey said he was being extorted by a “false claim” that he had given her sexually transmitted diseases. Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who represented White’s husband and mother, said that Carrey was “incoherent and unhinged,” adding, “He needs help.”

The lawsuit against Carrey was dismissed this past January.

In my presence Carrey never mentioned these people by name or cited any of these events directly. To the extent that he even acknowledged these tumultuous times, he tried to see them as an opportunity for personal growth.

“I’ve had incredible highs and incredible accomplishments happen in my life,” he said. “And at the same time, I’ve also had incredibly unjust and unfair things happen. Not that anybody cares when they hear that about someone like me. But I have. And those things have made me deeper.”

He continued: “There’s no one I can’t sit with now, after what I’ve been through, and say, ‘What’s your thing — what’s your pain?’ And what an incredible place to be as an artist.”

Among the few things Carrey worked on in this period was “Dark Crimes,” a thriller that he said was set to shoot in Chicago but which he wanted (and got) filmed in Poland, where its story takes place. “That was a very dark, terribly painful moment in my life,” he explained to me. “Poland was a rainy place with a lot of crows, man, and it was beautiful.”

Another project that Carrey started getting serious about was “Kidding.” The series was created by Dave Holstein, a writer for the anarchic Showtime comedy “Weeds,” who wrote its pilot script in response to what he felt were the constraints of conventional network sitcoms as well as the ubiquity of brooding anti-heroes on cable TV dramas.

This comedy-drama tells the story of Jeff Pickles, whose long-running series, “Mr. Pickles’ Puppet Time,” has endeared him to kids and parents for some 30 years, but whose equanimity comes unraveled when one of his children is killed in a car accident.

“He doesn’t want to break bad — he wants to stay good in a very cruel world,” Holstein said of the gentle protagonist of “Kidding.” “Personally, given the times we live in, I have a desire for optimism. I have a desire for someone like this to exist.”

Naturally, Holstein used Fred Rogers as a reference for the character. He also thought of Carrey, given that Holstein was 11 years old in 1994, the year that “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask” and “Dumb and Dumber” were released in theaters.

“He was the epitome of going to the movies and laughing,” he said of Carrey. “He was such a big part of joy, growing up.”

Just as audiences want to see Carrey reclaim his mojo and return to the kinds of roles that first made him popular, Holstein said they would naturally project some of these feelings onto the addled and tempest-tossed Jeff Pickles. “You wanted old Jim back, just like you wanted old Jeff back,” he said. Showtime began to court Carrey with the “Kidding” script, although he was not initially interested. In the meantime, Holstein started writing for “I’m Dying Up Here,” the network’s period comedy-drama set in the stand-up scene of 1970s Hollywood, which is produced by Carrey’s media company and on which he serves as an executive producer.

Gradually, Carrey came around to the idea of prestige cable series, to “Kidding” and to its underlying themes of suffering and relief that align with his own feelings.

“It says exactly what I want to say to the world: ‘Good luck escaping the pain — you’re not going to,'” Carrey explained. “But that’s beautiful. Even that’s going to turn into something glorious if you stick with it.”

The other clincher for Carrey was the addition of Gondry as a director and executive producer on “Kidding.”

When he and Carrey had their earliest face-to-face conversations about “Kidding,” Gondry said: “He looked tired. His hair was longer, and I immediately thought that was Mr. Pickles right there. He would bring something that was not necessarily on the page, that would make it stronger.”

With Carrey’s input and approval, the cast of “Kidding” grew to include Frank Langella as Jeff’s father and executive producer, Seb; Catherine Keener as Jeff’s sister and chief puppet maker, Deirdre; and Judy Greer as Jeff’s estranged wife, Jill.

Holstein has never run a television series before, and he discovered pretty early on that Carrey had no intention of being a silent collaborator on “Kidding.”

“We sat down a couple of times in his living room, and we would just bat ideas back and forth,” Holstein said. “An idea for a puppet would become a running joke for the season, which became a final image. You started to see what the show could do. It could touch on these dualities which I think he feels a lot in his own struggles between a personal and a public life.”

He was referring only to the themes of “Kidding” when he said this, but it sure seemed as if Holstein was describing something more. “If you’ve been pushing off your dark side your whole life and then you start to let it in, that’s a struggle,” he said. “It’s a struggle to understand that both a dark side and a light side can operate at the same time.” The set of “Kidding,” made up to look like the set of a children’s TV show in Columbus, Ohio, had a stupefying, vertigo-inducing quality; anyone here could be an actor playing a cameraperson, gaffer or grip, or an actual cameraperson, gaffer or grip.

Carrey, wearing the telltale vest and tie of Jeff Pickles, was engaged in what he called “back-ting”: miming some motions in the background of a scene that centered on Langella and Keener. Sometimes, when cut was called, Carrey would playfully declare, “Nailed it!” and flash an exaggerated thumbs-up; other times, he would despondently emphasize how much effort he was putting into a sequence that barely featured him.

“That’s a whole five-minute scene that’ll never be seen — a little speck in the corner,” he said at one point, only half-joking. “They have no idea that I went through hell for them.”

Carrey is not necessarily the sort of person who needs to be the center of attention at all times. On this day, the “Kidding” set was being visited by Tim Robbins, a friend of Holstein’s, and off-camera he and Carrey entertained each other by swapping mangled mispronunciations of the title of Robbins’ film “The Shawshank Redemption.”

When Robbins pointed out that they were in the studio where Ray Bolger filmed his slapstick scarecrow dance in “The Wizard of Oz,” Carrey’s mouth curled into a beatific smile. “Even when you’re gone, you reinspire,” Carrey said. “Ray Bolger has no idea that, in 2018, Jim Carrey’s here, just tripping out.”

Back in his trailer, Carrey shared with me his drawings of comedians he admires, including his portrait of John Belushi looking like a bull about to charge. (“To me this face says: ‘Stop me? Go ahead and try,'” Carrey explained.)

A majority of his illustrations were political: Paul Manafort as an alien creature slipping a human mask over its reptilian face; Rep. Trey Gowdy metamorphosing, Gregor Samsa style, into an insect. (An exhibition of about 80 of these cartoons is planned to open in October at the Maccarone gallery in Los Angeles.)

Carrey made no apology for their content or tone. “It’s my knee-jerk reaction to what’s going on,” he said. “I want it to be harsh and I want it to be loud.” If his cartoons revealed an angry side to him that the public rarely sees, Carrey said so be it. “Any human being you’ve ever seen in your life, including Gandhi, has been angry,” he said. (Carrey was among the boldface names who said they would not participate in this year’s New Yorker festival, citing the magazine’s decision to host Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, as a headliner. The magazine subsequently rescinded its invitation to Bannon.)

Even his simple drawings, Carrey added, demonstrated something fundamental about art. “The alchemy is in taking whatever’s painful, whatever’s confusing, and transforming it into something that didn’t exist before,” he said.

But, to pose a question that “Kidding” asks repeatedly: How much can art really do to assuage the suffering of the people who make it?

Or, to put it another way: Is there something strange or even perilous about making a show about a man who is using his TV show to work through (or possibly avoid) his grief, starring a man who is using his TV show to work through (or possibly avoid) his grief? As obvious as the point appeared to me, Carrey’s collaborators were not especially eager to pursue this line of inquiry. But in an affectionate way, they seemed to want to shield him from further pain.

“Certainly, I’m not in a position to talk about his personal life,” Gondry said. “With Jim, I know he’s going through some difficult times. Because I can see it in his face. I simply ask him to delve in that direction of the character.”

Greer focused at first on the Jeff Pickles character, whom she compared to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. “He’s this special creature that needs to be protected and kept on a spaceship so that he doesn’t die,” she said.

But Greer could not help extending her metaphor. “I feel like I want to take care of Jim Carrey,” she said. “He’s so open he’ll give you whatever you want. It’s not that he doesn’t have fear — he’s so open about expressing his fears, he makes it seem like he doesn’t have them.”

When I finally asked Carrey directly — was it perhaps not the best time to be playing someone whose life, profession and palpable anguish were so inextricably intertwined? — I found myself falling down another ontological wormhole with him.

Steering the conversation away from himself, Carrey said that there were “a lot of parallels in the character’s intention.” Then he compared Jeff Pickles to the race horse Secretariat, who was reputed to have, as Carrey put it, “a heart that was three times bigger than the other horses’.”

“That’s Jeff, the heart that has to be protected, and we know it’s falling apart,” he said. “But it’s only falling apart because that’s how life is.”

Referring to the teachings of Jeff Foster, a spiritual guru he regards as a friend, Carrey explained, “He said what you should do is change the meaning of the word ‘depressed’ to ‘deep rest.’ Because depression is your body finally deciding it’s had it with the person you’re trying to play in the world.”

Regardless of who Carrey believes he is right now — even if he’s not entirely sure who he is at the moment — he feels certain he is no longer playing a persona or operating by anyone’s rules but his own.

For the first time in a long while, Carrey said, he is aware of his solitude — not just noticing but enjoying it. “I love being in the midst of people,” he said, “and I also abso-[expletive]-lutely love to be alone in my life. I love my empty [expletive] halls that I walk down, and talking to myself and whatever it is I want to do.”

Whatever personal pain he is still tending to, Carrey tries to find solace in people’s capacity for creativity and in the work they make, which he offered as a counterbalance to the messiness and imperfection of life.

“We’re magical. We create magic,” he said. “And yet, at the same time, so much of it is born out of this desperate need to find peace. To get to that place where everything’s going to be all right. We’re addicted to unfinished-ness.”

Lately Carrey has found himself fascinated with narratives — not just the kinds that get told in popular entertainment but the ones we construct out of the disparate events in our lives to make our experiences appear rational and orderly. As tenuous as he can sometimes feel, he is certain he knows the narrative about himself that will eventually prevail.

“There’s a guy named Jim Carrey,” he said, “who has a really sweet, wonderful story about a bunch of people who totally loved him and believed in him, and made it way beyond what anybody imagined he could. And he turned out to be an all-right guy. That’s the winning tale to me.”