Jim Carrey has been making the Zoom rounds on talk shows this week to promote his new novel, Memoirs and Misinformation, which he describes thusly: “None of this is real and all of it is true.” The actor, who recently reached box-office heights again with Sonic the Hedgehog, has shared more than a few great stories, including one about being in Hawaii during the false missile warning.
Meanwhile, over on WTF with Marc Maron, Jim Carrey — who is very New Age these days — spent some time talking about coming up in the comedy scene with the late Sam Kinison, which is a bizarre pairing considering their different career paths.
As for Jim Carrey’s career path, he got his big break when he moved from stand-up into In Living Color, the ’90s sketch show from Keenen Ivory Wayans and his brother, Damon Wayans, with whom Jim Carrey acted with in Earth Girls Are Easy. It’s the same sketch show where others, like Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez, started their careers.
For those less familiar with Carrey’s early career, he played a character he created with Adam Small and Steve Oedekerk called Fire Marshall Bill, who can best be described as the After Picture of a MacGruber sketch. He is a fire marshall with no lips owing to the fact that he’s been involved in a number of fires. He was absolutely hysterical, and probably the most popular recurring character on the sketch show series.
That character, Carrey admits himself, is basically responsible for the success of Carrey’s first comedy hit, Ace Ventura, which he co-wrote with Oedekerk during downtime in In Living Color. Fans turned out for Ace Ventura to see what Fire Marshall Bill would do in a movie. However, as dark as Fire Marshall Bill already is, the original conception of that character was even darker, as he tells Marc Maron.
“Fire Marshall Bill was born out of a sketch … called The Death Wish Foundation. It was a sketch about kids who were passing away, and their posthumous wish is what we were concentrating on. My posthumous wish as this sick kid was to go to an amusement park after I died. So, it would be me, on the rides, flopping around in the seats on the roller coaster like Weekend at Bernies. That didn’t get on, but the character stuck. The character became Fire Marshall Bill.”
“Oh my god,” Maron exclaimed. “That is a dark backstory!”
Indeed, it is. Fortunately, this was also several years before his method acting made Tommy Lee Jones hate him.
Source: WTF with Marc Maron