The first time I saw this different side to Jim Carrey was in the 1996 Ben Stiller directed film The Cable Guy. It was firmly set in comedy genre mould, and we’d already seen Jim Carrey go full on bad guy as the Riddler in Batman Forever, but there was a new edge to the performance in The Cable Guy. That wildness behind the eyes wasn’t all about seeking laughs this time. There was a gleeful evil in Carrey’s Cable Guy, one that came from wanting to be noticed.

His character had been ignored his whole life, his childhood spent being brought up by television rather than his neglectful parents. It also works to mirror the psychology of any comedian, desperate for the audience to laugh, for their approval – they just want to be noticed. Carrey’s performance is still huge, almost overpowering the film, but this time equaling the laughs is an odd fear. Maybe this is why the film failed to find the audience it deserved. It’s tense and oddly scary, this tone would have been hard to market to fans awaiting the next Ace Ventura or The Mask. Its box office failure led to Carrey never being this wild eyed and evil again.

The closest he came was Count Olaf in the film version of Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events. He got to stretch himself with Peter Sellers impressions including “Stefano…an Italian man.” but the Count still had a cold stare of pure evil. Even though it’s aimed at children the book series has a macabre spine through it which Carrey relished.

The regular Carrey performance traits were mostly absent for The Truman Show, but this was a deliberate decision. Director Peter Weir compared the work with Carrey on The Truman Show to working with Robin Williams on Dead Poets Society in an interview with Filmscouts.com: “They wanted that control from a director. They are so diverse and so talented, they can run something by you, first this way, then that way, and before you know it, you’re picking from twenty different interpretations they’ve applied to the same material.”

He even mentions how sometimes Carrey would push to make it bigger but the choices made in the edit were to reign those in. This is never more apparent than a quote from a Total Film interview where Weir remembers that “In one scene, Jim did this silent comedy thing. But it was too much, it didn’t fit the tone of the picture.”