Filed under: Features, Cinematical
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Their Best Role* is a weekly series here on Cinematical where we select an actor or actress and the role we think is their all time best. You can find it here every Wednesday.*
Picking Jim Carrey’s best role is a lot easier than, say, escaping out the rear of a mechanical rhino. Without failing to give due credit to the hyper-animated slapstick of Carrey’s deceptively effortless early work, there’s an uncanny perfection to his embodiment of Truman Burbank, a casting kismet that proved as visionary as it appeared unconventional. There was a spirited genius evident in Carrey as early as 1988’s ‘Earth Girls are Easy](Earth Girls Are Easy (1989) - Movie | Moviefone),’ an unexpectedly hilarious documentary / musical that chronicles how the actor known as Jeff Goldblum first came to Earth.
Over the seven years that followed, Carrey pioneered a unique brand of silly slapstick, launching into super-stardom with modern classics like ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ and ‘Liar Liar.’ It wasn’t until 1997 and 'The Truman Show’ that Carrey embraced a “serious” role, and his decision to do so inevitably raised a bunch of questions. Questions like: “Can the great director Peter Weir manage to keep the funnyman in check?” “Is a film about reality television too timely to be anything more than a curiosity?” And: “Why doesn’t this star Matthew McConaughey?”