Jim Carrey Announces Retirement From Acting
Actor, comedian, and Grinch Jim Carrey has announced that he is retiring from acting, but he might come back for a very specific reason.
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Jim Carrey might be done with acting. Ace Ventura himself recently sat down for an interview with Access Hollywood as part of the ongoing press junket for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and revealed that he is at the very least taking a long break from any more roles. To be fair, Carrey was kind of waffling on the subject, going from definitively saying that he was retiring to saying he could probably be tempted back into show business by a perfect, golden-lettered script personally delivered to him by angels to making the bold claim that he is the first and only celebrity to ever say that he has “enough.” We will have to take Jim Carrey at his kinda-word and assume that after he assays the role of Doctor Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik one more time, he is hanging his acting shingle up. Here’s the actual moment in the interview:
If there is ever a celebrity who could pretty much quit his job, it would be Jim Carrey. The star of Liar Liar spent the 1990s as one of the biggest movie actors in the world, legendarily being the first actor to receive $20 million for a single film. That film in question was the extremely underrated dark comedy The Cable Guy, directed by Ben Stiller and featuring re-writes by a then mostly unknown Judd Apatow. Though considered a flop at the time, the movie served as a turning point in Carrey’s career from loud, broad comedies like Dumb and Dumber and The Mask to increasingly serious work like The Truman Show and Man on the Moon. This period of Jim Carrey’s career arguably hit its apex with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which cemented Carrey’s new reputation as a surprisingly sensitive and emotive actor.
Jim Carrey did not quite manage to keep the streak of critical acclaim going, and soon reverted to comedies like Fun with Dick and Jane and Mr. Popper’s Penguins. In recent years, he starred in the Showtime comedy-drama Kidding, in which he portrayed a Mr. Rogers-like children’s entertainer in the midst of a personal crisis. The Sonic the Hedgehog movies have served as a bit of a popular comeback for Carrey (and definitely allowed him to indulge in his long-dormant manic overacting), but from the sounds of it, Carrey might be about to go sit a few rounds out.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed. Jim Carrey has the ability to stop acting as long as he likes, since he’s got that Batman Forever money. He also might just have been a bit tired of answering questions about what Sonic the Hedgehog is really like between takes, or he could be serious that he would just like to retire to his extremely prolific hobby of painting. There almost certainly is going to be a Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (maybe with Jason Momoa), so we’ll see if the role of Doctor Robotnik is golden-lettered enough to get Jim Carrey back in the game.
