Jim Carrey at Cesars: People have always under-appreciated Carrey’s genius talents

It’s truly a strange world we live in when a celebratory moment turns into a wild conspiracy theory that too many people were super keen to buy into.

Jim Carrey was not replaced by a clone. Obviously.

The theory of Occam’s razor is that the simplest, most glaring explanation is usually the solution.

If you see Carrey, 64, at the Cesar Awards, the French version of the Oscars, and he looks slightly different from when you last saw him, what’s more likely? That he’s aged or that he’s been replaced by a body double, clone or impostor?

Carrey can be a bit of a kook, and he’s previously talked about deploying “decoys” out to fool the paparazzi off his trail, but sending a stand-in to accept an honorary award from a prestigious film body either as some performance piece or because he’s a shut-in, well, that’s nuts.

It reflects really poorly on our conspiracy-addled age that this brain fart took off as much as it did online as it did. Likely a lot of people who posted about it or shared it didn’t actually believe it, but thought it was a bit of “hehe fun”, but there is a nasty streak that underpins all this.

Celebrities with their fancy houses, private jets and entourage-enabled bubbles provoke schadenfreude in even the most pure-hearted of people, and there’s always a voracious appetite to see them fall.

After all the hoopla, the adults entered the room to shut it down. A delegate from the Cesar Awards, Gregory Caulier, confirmed it was Carrey and that it had all been organised months in advance. Carrey’s representative then released a statement that he had indeed attended the Cesar Awards.

Amid all this nonsense, the story that was completely eclipsed was that Carrey had been in Paris to be recognised for his decades-long contribution in the screen industry. He, not a French speaker, worked hard to deliver his acceptance speech in French.

“How fortunate I have been to share this art with so many people who have truly opened their hearts to me,” he said in French. He seemed visibly moved as he stood at the podium and looked out at the standing ovation.

He was handed the statue by his friend and collaborator, Michel Gondry, and actor Camille Cottin. He gave thanks to his family in the audience and paid tribute to his father, Percy Joseph Carrey.

He goofed around a little – he stuck his tongue out at one point (“Ma langue est fatiguee” – and everyone in the audience was beaming up at him, utterly charmed and in no doubt as to whether that was the real Carrey.

It should’ve been a moment of triumph because Carrey has been one of the great under-appreciated actors of his generation.

A huge part of that is the persistent bias against comedic actors, even when they do drama. Adam Sandler has still never been nominated for an Oscar, despite stellar performances in dramatic films including Punch-Drunk Love, Uncut Gems and Jay Kelly.

When you talk about Carrey’s thespian talents, the things that are generally recalled first are his more serious work in the likes of Man on the Moon, The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

He is fantastic in all of these roles. Who else could’ve played Truman Burbank, an innocent soul contending with the discovery that he is the subject of a reality TV show from the moment of his birth, with that same verve, a combination of good guy charisma and the determination to pursue the unknown?

And if you want to see Carrey’s commitment to embodying Andy Kaufman, watch the 2017 documentary of Carrey remaining in character for four months during the production of Man on the Moon, almost losing himself into that performance.

But we too easily distinguish a comedic actor’s dramatic side and their broad comedy films. We do it with Sandler, we did it with Robin Williams, and everyone definitely draws a line with Tom Hanks in respect to his pre- and post-Philadelphia career.

For the thespians are lucky enough to be gifted at both, we need to understand that one informs the other. And many would argue that comedy is harder, and if you can nail the timing on a joke, you can nail drama.

Carrey is in a league of the few who can truly throw his full physicality into a performance to get the bigger and longer laugh.

His face and body has an elasticity and versatility that we have seen time and again in roles including the Mask, the Riddler, as Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events, as Fletcher Reed in Liar Liar, as Ace Ventura, as the Grinch, and definitely as Dumb and Dumber’s Lloyd Christmas.

When he popped up as a cameo in The Office US (as the Fingerlakes guy) and 30 Rock (as Leap Day Williams), his few moments on screen are the most memorable moments of those episodes.

He’s OK to play the fool because that’s what those performances require. That’s the real genius of Carrey.

Not all those films are brilliant, and some of them don’t hold up great (ahem, Ace Ventura) but Carrey is always (ALWAYS) so watchable.

He commands a scene, he commands attention and even if you slowed everything down to quarter-speed, you still can’t quite figure out how he manages to pull everything off.

In a 1984 Q&A with Interview magazine, which had featured him, then 22 years old and newly arrived in Los Angeles, as one of the new forces in comedy, he recalled that throughout his childhood, he spent most of his time staring at a mirror.

“I just spent hours making faces at myself, having a good time,” he said.

Carrey is the reason the Sonic the Hedgehog movies are weirdly good. OK, maybe the films aren’t but he sure is.

When he took on the role of Dr Robotnik and unleashed his almost primal energy into an unhinged villain, it was vintage Carrey, and it elevated an otherwise mediocre kids movie into something that was worthy of your time.

Carrey once said that he played “Jim Carrey” as a character, even if it wasn’t necessarily intentional.

“I was just building something that people would like but it was a character, so I played the guy that was free from concerns so that people who watched me would be free from concern,” he told the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017.

Maybe the Carrey that was onstage at the Cesars was a version of himself, but there was great sincerity emanating from a man who was finally been recognised by his (French) peers.

It’s such a shame that moment was hijacked by the internet’s bloodlust for stupidity.