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Sun 18 May 2025 22:30, UK
Jim Carrey is often described as a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life performer. Watch any of his movies, and you’re likely to forget the names, faces, and characters of everyone else on screen. His kinetic performances take up all the oxygen in the room – and if you’re a fan, that’s exactly how it should be. Even if you’re not, there’s no denying he’s a comedic genius. His timing, physicality, and uncanny talent for impressions have made him one of the most successful actors of the last few decades.
Given how idiosyncratic Carrey is, you might assume that he is always playing himself, but on at least one occasion, he delved so deeply into the character of a real-life person that he lost himself entirely. Directed by Miloš Forman and released in 1999, Man on the Moon is a biopic of the late comedian Andy Kaufman, who became famous as a guest star on the first season of Saturday Night Live and was most widely known for his portrayal of Latka Gravas in the sitcom Taxi.
Kaufman was often called an ‘anti-comedian’ because he didn’t tell jokes and eschewed the usual format of comedy sketches. Instead, he used a constant bait-and-switch method in which he would do outlandish things and make the audience constantly question whether he was doing it in character or being himself. He was more of a performance artist than a comedian, and even when he appeared to be breaking the fourth wall, he was always performing. No one, including himself, seemed to know who the real Andy Kaufman was.
Like many people, Carrey believed that Kaufman was a revelation, a groundbreaking performer of untold brilliance. But things got more complicated when he took on the task of portraying him in a movie. “When I heard I had the part, I was looking at the ocean,” Carrey remembered. “And that’s the moment when Andy came back to make his movie. What happened after was out of my control.”
What happened on the set of Man on the Moon is one of the most infamous instances of method acting in cinematic history. Forget about Jared Leto’s most wanky forays into self-indulgence; Carrey is unbeatable. Not only did he remain in character on and off set, but he seemed to completely lose touch with reality. Imagine trying to embody a person who was constantly slipping and sliding into provocative, disruptive, occasionally dangerous alter-egos whose sole purpose was to be agents of chaos.
It’s unclear how Carrey felt about the whole thing. In the 2017 documentary about the making of Man on the Moon, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, the star talks extensively about the experience, but he was so deeply immersed in the character that he has little insight into his actions beyond the feeling that they were not, in fact, his own.
“This crazy melodrama started happening all over the place,” he said, as if he were not the genesis of it all.
He tormented crew members with deafening music, attacked cast members, snuck into Steven Spielberg’s office on the Universal lot, and crashed a car, all while insisting that he be called ‘Andy.’ It’s no wonder that the studio withheld all the behind-the-scenes footage for nearly 20 years. As Carrey said, “They didn’t want people to think I was an asshole.”
It took time for the actor to recover from himself, or, in his mind, return to himself. “When the movie was over,” he said. “I couldn’t remember who I was anymore”. He retreated to comedies for a while, delving back into his very particular brand of humour with Me, Myself & Irene and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. When he did return to serious drama in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it was probably for the best that he wasn’t inhabiting a real person.
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