8 Actors Who Unexpectedly And Brilliantly Played Against Type
3. Jim Carrey As Joel Barish (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind)
Jim Carrey represents a gold standard for actors playing against their typical typecasting. After making a name (and an awful lot of money) for himself playing three anarchic, larger-than-life characters in one year in 1994s The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb And Dumber, it wouldve been entirely plausible for him to keep returning to the well and live out his days playing cartoonish character after cartoonish character. Apparently that just wasnt enough for Jim and his performance as Truman Burbank in The Truman Show showed a whole new side to the actor. Unfortunately, the films marketing department clearly werent confident enough in his abilities to sell a drama, choosing to primarily focus the advertising surrounding the release on the comedic first act of the film. Still, those who saw the film saw the spark of something new, a tiny flame that was fanned by Michel Gondry when he cast Carrey in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Completely gone was the knockabout, rubber-faced Carrey we all knew, replaced by an actor who truly sold the character of Joel Barish, squeezing every bit of pathos and beauty from his role as a man so determined to mend his broken heart, hes willing to outright erase every memory of his ex-girlfriend.
