Fr once, Jim Carrey is keeping a straight face. 'I do like to push the envelope here and there,' he says earnestly, when we meet on his recent Paris press tour. To some, this may mean appearing in groundbreaking special effects-driven efforts, such as last year's 3-D take on the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. To others, it's the lengths that he'll go for a role - living as comic Andy Kaufman for months, for example, to prepare for his Golden Globe-winning work in Man on the Moon. Then again, the Ontario-born actor may just be referring to how he loves to be provocative.
His latest role in I Love You Phillip Morris is certainly that. Based on a true story, he plays Steven Russell, a married man who comes out of the closet before landing in jail. Convicted for pulling scams to maintain his new flamboyant existence, he meets the love of his life, the warm-hearted Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) in prison. It is the first gay character of Carrey's career, but he's adamant that's irrelevant. 'I wasn't playing gay. I was playing love for another human being.'
Nevertheless, with a close-to-the-bone script written and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, the men behind the mightily un-PC Bad Santa, the actor admits it wasn't a popular choice in the Carrey camp. 'There were people in my circle that were concerned about it,' he says. 'People close to me were going, 'I don't know, man, there's some pretty edgy stuff here.' And I went 'Well, why else do we live, except to do something that people haven't seen before in a film and to push the boundary a little bit?''
Phillip Morris is only one of three scripts he's received that he knew he wanted to do immediately, Carrey says, the others being high-brow efforts The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 'A lot of times, especially with bigger comedies, when you get a script, it's generally a good idea that you have to then sit in a boiler room and turn into something. But there are very few scripts ... where I feel like nothing really has to happen, they're already there, they're already realised - but this was one of them.'
Dressed in a brown checked suit and black shirt and sporting a pudding bowl haircut and unkempt beard, the 48-year-old Carrey looks in good health - unlike when he was preparing for a sequence in the film where Russell fakes his own physical decline from Aids to escape jail, during which the actor shed weight dramatically, having reduced his diet to just tomato drinks and supplements. 'In the last two days before the main shots where I looked very skinny, I actually just stopped eating,' he says. 'I was completely exhausted and raw during that part of it. I was wandering around like an old man. No energy whatsoever.'
Fortunately, he seems energised by the real-life Russell, now nine years into a 144-year sentence in Texas. While Carrey couldn't meet him, Russell sent him taped messages. 'The last thing he said on his recordings, was 'Don't take any s**t, Jim.'' Doubtless, this is why he is defiant when asked if playing Russell might damage his career. 'I don't really care about the reaction, if there's a negative reaction. I care about doing a story about amazing, fascinating people. And it's a true story. It's a true story about love, and someone's relentlessness to find it and keep it.'