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The most fortunate event in the development hell that was Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events was getting Jim Carrey to say yes -- thus empowering the film.
"I don't know why they called me!" Carrey says in mock disgust during a Los Angeles interview for the fantastical children's movie, which was adapted from three of the fantastical children's books by the mysterious author Lemony Snicket.
Carrey plays dastardly Count Olaf, a very bad actor trying to exploit or even eliminate the newly orphaned Baudelaire children, thus inheriting their fortune. Hmmm, did they need a very bad actor to play Olaf? Was this an insult?
"The only actors I could think of were dead," says Daniel Handler, the 34-year-old San Francisco writer who has taken on the task of "handling" the affairs of Mr. Snicket (it's all a ruse, of course, because Handler is the real author of the 11 Lemony Snicket books that have sold more than 27 million).
"James Mason, I thought, would be really good -- and he's dead," Handler says. "And Boris Karloff is another natural choice." Karloff is also dead -- and he could never act anyway. "Neither can Count Olaf," Handler points out happily.
But the producers would just sigh as Handler trotted out his suggestions. "This is why the novelist is rarely hired," Handler says with dry wit about participating in the project, which was eventually rounded into shape as an adapted screenplay by another writer, Robert Gordon.
"They are just not too many actors who I think can be hilarious and terrifying at the same time," Handler says. "There are a lot of actors who can be hilarious and a lot of actors who can be terrifying, and there are a lot of actors who think they're hilarious and are really terrifying, and a lot who think they are terrifying but are really hilarious. But there are very few who can do it at once."
Jim Carrey can do it, Handler says. "So I tried to write a Jim Carrey movie and he liked it. So, when I heard the news (that Carrey said yes), I was like, 'Well, I did it!' "
The film is based on the Lemony Snicket books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window. Count Olaf is the centre of the madness, especially because he morphs into two other characters who try to fool the children while putting his diabolical plan into action. Carrey also plays Stefano, a fake herpetologist who is afraid of snakes, and Captain Sham, a fake Newfoundland boat captain who's neither the B'y that catches the fish nor the one who takes them home to Liza.
"He's just a fun character to play," the 41-year-old Carrey says, "not to mention that it is the most dangerous kind of character in the world -- an actor losing his hair!" Going bald in the profession can be a calamity, says Carrey. "It's responsible for many of the atrocities in the last few years!"
On a more serious note, playing Olaf and his two alter egos forced Carrey to go through extensive makeup again, a reprise of the horrors he went through to get ready for his closeups in The Grinch.
"I don't like it at all," Carrey says of sessions that put him in disguise master Bill Corso's makeup chair for hours, including for a scalp shave every day to get the baldness thing going. "I like the result. The result is fantastic and I have fantastic people working with me who are incredibly patient: Billy Corso and Anne Morgan, who does my hair."
Both have worked with Carrey before, Corso most recently on Bruce Almighty, The Majestic and The Grinch. "They do brilliant work," Carrey says, "and they put up with me when I lose my mind and have to run out of the trailer screaming.
"But I was pretty zen on this one. After The Grinch, which was like CIA terrorist training ... (Carrey pauses to contemplate a living nightmare) ... that one just brutalized me so badly that now it's like a cakewalk. You could hit me with a brick right now and I'd be, 'Hi, I love ya!' "
In life, while few are as extreme as Count Olaf, everyone has a strange relative, Carrey is told.
"Some of us are the strange relative!" Carrey jokes, or not, fessing up to his status as the family clown. But there is something very personal about Count Olaf with his bald pate and wisps of greying hair on the temples, eyebrows and chin, and with Carrey's long face overemphasized.
"The weird thing is that Olaf turned out looking a lot like my dad, which is really frightening to me, you know," Carrey says with feeling, remembering the late Percy Carrey, who raised his family with difficult economic and health issues in the Toronto area, at one point maintaining them in a homeless state while living out of a family vehicle. "I usually try to put a little bit of Dad-ism in my roles so it's a kind of wink to my family when they see the movies. But they saw the pictures for this film and went, 'Dude, okay, now you're starting to scare us!' Because it really is like my dad."
Carrey was also inspired to model his role on "a slightly less human inspiration." A bird! "Not a smart bird," he says. "This one was a predatory bird. He was like the kind of bird that waits for you to leave the nest and then he steals the eggs."
As for Captain Sham, Carrey -- now a dual Canadian-American citizen who remains proud of his Canadian roots -- invoked Newfoundland culture. "Yeah, the Newfie accent," Carrey says in response to a question from the Sun. "I don't even know if that's politically correct to say. Probably not but, whatever, stone me!
"It was written as Captain Sham, the crotchety piratey guy and I didn't want to do the same things that everybody does. There's a whole group of people out there who have not been recognized: Newfoundlanders, man, they're such characters. The fishing boat captain from Newfoundland (Carrey launches into a nearly unintelligible rant in his comic accent), 'Me son!' I don't know if it's accurate but, again, I didn't really try that hard for accuracy because Olaf wouldn't."
Not surprisingly, director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile), who replaced Barry Sonnefeld on the project, was keen on collaborating with Carrey. "I got to work with a schizophrenic -- in the best sense of the word," Silberling says. "Jim is an unbelievable character actor. I think if I had hired somebody else I might have had a fantastic Count Olaf but I wouldn't have had a Stefano or a Captain Sham. Jim is so inventive that what I got from him is another person who is not quite mature, so he could think like a 14-year-old or a 13-year-old, the way we all did when we were making the movie."
A Series Of Unfortunate Events is grim -- or Grimm, really -- and the film brims with dark, sinister passages which could prove scary to the youngest members of the audience. Still, dark is good for kids in general, Carrey says.
"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with the child-kidnapping creature, that freaked me out when I was a kid -- but I loved it."
As for the age limits on the new film, "It depends," Carrey says. "I wouldn't bring your four-year-old, maybe. I don't know. But I think it's more than just entertainment. It is entertaining and it's funny but, at the same time, as the books did, I'm hoping the movie taps into something that is going on with young kids and teenagers."
That something is the aloneness children feel when their parents, guardians or elders don't listen to what the kids have to say. "We're kind of on our own in the world," Carrey says. "I lump myself in with (the kids) because I'm immature. But they all feel they're up against not being believed by anybody and they have to prove everything. So they do feel on their own, taking care of themselves."
A critical point in the film, as it was in the series of books, occurs when Count Olaf slaps young Klaus Baudelaire in the face. Audiences gasp when they see it on screen.
"There was controversy," Carrey admits, "as to whether to have that in the movie or not. And I said, 'You know what? Bambi dies, dudes, Bambi dies!' " Carrey is forgetting, of course, that it was Bambi's mom who got blasted by the hunters but the point is still valid: Children's entertainment can contain heinous scenes for the sake of reality.
"In most really great movies that connect with people," Carrey says, "there is some kind of tragedy involved and some kind of pain involved and it is a strange kind of balance that we're striking here. I'm not sure if it's been done in this way before. So, although I want to be entertaining, the bottom line is that Count Olaf is a f---er!"
Carrey stops himself short and gasps. "Sorry ... okay, okay ... for the kids' version, Olaf is not a nice person!
"You know, I think he has to be that way. I said early on I wanted (audiences) to laugh but, at the same time, the danger has to be real or we would have nothing. The movie is meaningless without real danger!"