Jim Carrey went on The Howard Stern Show yesterday to promote Dumb And Dumber To and relay odd stories about seeing things in the desert and method acting as Andy Kaufman. But more importantly, he directly addressed some old rumors about tension between him and Tommy Lee Jones when they played The Riddler and Two-Face in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever.
The film came out in 1995, just one year after Carrey accomplished something that may never be repeated. The year before, Dumb And Dumber had grossed $16M in its opening weekend and $247M during its theatrical run. The movie opened against Cobb starring Tommy Lee Jones as the titular absurdly-racist, cantankerous, impotent Georgia Peach, a movie which pulled in less than $64,000 its opening weekend and grossed under a million in theaters. The box-office competition may have set a sour tone for what came next.
Carrey explains his first meeting with Jones at the 55-minute mark in the video above. Here’s the interesting bit, partially transcribed by Fashionstyle with corrections and additions made by us.
“I was really looking forward to working with Tommy, because he’s a fantastic actor, and he still is to me. I love him, I mean he’s amazing, but he was a little crusty. He was a little crusty. Sometimes that Rhodes Scholarship is more of a weapon than an asset.
“I think he was just a little freaked out because Dumb and Dumber came out on the same weekend as Cobb, and Cobb was his big swing for the fences and that didn’t work out and that freaked him out a bit.
“I walked into a restaurant the night before our big scene in The Riddler’s lair. [The maître d informed Carrey that Tommy Lee Jones was also in the restaurant.]
“I went up to say hi [to Jones] and the blood drained from his face, in such a way that I realized that I had become the face of his pain or something. He got up, kind of shaking and hugged me and said ‘I hate you. I really don’t like you.’ And I was like ‘Wow, okay. Well, what’s going on man?’ And he said, ‘I cannot sanction your buffoonery.’ […] I said, ‘I think this part requires that the tone of this thing is kind of childlike evil and stuff, and I think you might have trouble there, so I wish you the best.'” [emphasis ours]
Yes. I’m sure that’s exactly what Carrey said in the moment. It’s certainly not what he later wished he’d said instead of backing away slowly because you do not want to be around Tommy Lee Jones when he goes full Tommy Lee Jones.
He’s so not sanctioning our buffoonery right now.
On an even more awesome note, at the end of the interview, Stern joked that Jones gave Dumb And Dumber To “zero stars and said ‘f*ck you’.”
Carrey replied, “I hope Cobb 2 isn’t coming out.”
Via CBM and Fashionstyle