PREMIERE, December, 2001

In a dual role well worth remembering, he plays an amnesiac screenwriter in The Majestic – and finds himself in the process.

By Anna David

The public has long been determined to classify Jim Carrey, no matter how daunting the task may be: He’s manic; he’s calm; he’s funny; he’s serious; he’s in love; he’s heartbroken. The man himself willingly offers that he’s both the “twisted, palsied kid who’s trying to pull his lip over his head to get attention” and the sometime painter who’s “tired of saying words like I and me.” Today, he’s feeling both thoughtful – the word he chooses, accurately it seems, to describe his current state of mind – and restless. (He confesses that he’s eager to get going on a motorcycle ride with a friend.)

Like all of us, Jim Carrey is a contradiction – but mostly he’s a guy with a lot of expectations to fulfill who’s constantly reinventing new ways to do so. “Really, I think we’re all two characters,” Carrey says in a voice subdued to the point where it’s only vaguely recognizable, an almost eletcroshocked version of the one that screeched “all-righty-then” and “sssmokin” with such hysterical conviction. Sure, he’s talking about his role in The Majestic as a 1950s blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who suffers from amnesia and is mistaken for a small town’s long-lost war hero. But he’s also talking about himself. “I’m happy sometimes, I’m turbulent sometimes,” he muses. “Whatever’s going on is what I try to accept in myself.” He knows this marks him as slightly different from the norm. “I think if we all acted the way we really felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing,” he says.

Embracing “the natural order of things” and allowing himself to just be exactly where he is and not let people try to fix him has been a study in maturation. “It seems ridiculous for me, at my age, to be saying I’m growing up now,” he admits, “but it’s true.”

This personal growth is at least partially due to his experience making The Majestic, a film that has yet to be mentioned without the adjective Capraesque. Carrey plays both Pete Appleton, a slightly self-involved victim of the McCarthy blacklist, and Luke Trimble, a loving son (to Martin Landau) and boyfriend (to The X-Files‘ Laurie Holden) who devotes his time to reviving the town’s long-dormant Majestic movie house. Almost from its first shot, the performance had people talking the half-dreaded O-word. (His publicist has even requested that questions about said award be avoided.) Despite what those who hand out the little gold men might think of him, he’s certainly gathered some enthusiastic fans along the way. “I absolutely, with every ounce of conviction in my body, will tell you that it is [his best performance yet],” says Majestic director Frank Darabont, who’s broken out of jail after making The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile back-to-back. “It’s the first opportunity that Jim’s had to really operate from sea level as an actor, from a completely organic, honest place, and the guy has absolutely blown me away.”