Funnyman Carrey takes on wackiest role to date

Boys will be boys and Jim Carrey will be Jim Carrey.

But then Carrey, known for his wacky roles, is not like the rest of Tinseltown – and never conforms to type.

I Love You Phillip Morris is his wackiest role to date and incredibly, it’s a true story. Jim plays immensely clever conman Steven Russell, who escaped from prison four times in the States to be with his gay lover Phillip Morris.

While Morris helped the filmmakers and makes a cameo appearance, Russell is currently in solitary confinement serving a sentence that could see him die in a Texan jail.

The film about their lives, based on a book by investigative journalist Steve McVickers, only made it to the big screen because of French film producer Luc Besson.

Whereas Hollywood backed away from the project, Besson had no qualms about the film.

It’s for this reason that Carrey, his co-star Ewan McGregor, Luc Besson and writer/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are sitting in front of the garish yellow poster, which looks slightly out of place in a plush Parisien hotel room.

Floppy-haired Carrey, who’s just become a grandad for the first time at 48, admits the script was one of a select few that he has just ‘had’ to do.

“A lot of times when you get a script, especially with comedies, it’s a good idea to sit in a room and turn it into something. There are various scripts that come through when I think that nothing has to happen, they’re already there and this was one of them,” he says.

“With The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and this, I had the same feeling and I called my people and said ‘I don’t care if I have to pay to be in the movie, I have to do this movie, this is one of the ones’.”

Some of the actor’s representatives weren’t so sure about his choice of film, fearing a gay sex scene and a kiss with Ewan McGregor was too “edgy”.

But Canadian Carrey ignored the naysayers.

“Why else do we live except to do something that people haven’t seen before in film and to push the boundary a little bit, so when it snaps back, it doesn’t snap back quite so far?

“I don’t really care about the reaction if there’s a negative reaction,” he adds. “I care about doing a story about amazing fascinating people that’s unbelievable, but real.”

While McGregor met Phillip Morris as part of his preparation to play him, Carrey wasn’t allowed to visit Steven Russell in prison because it was feared his star status would attract too much attention. Instead, journalist Steve McVickers went on his behalf and recorded their conversations.

“I listened to recordings of him and it was quite fascinating to hear what excited him and to listen to the dialogue about the movie happening,” said Carrey.

Carrey shot to fame for his funny voices and rubbery face contortions in 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the following year’s The Mask.

Since then he’s gone on to play a range of characters. But the actor insists that rather than inventing a series of characters, each of those roles demonstrates a little part of him.

“It’s all me, everything I do is me. I’m so lucky to have stumbled into a life where I can be all of that and Luc will allow me to make a movie like this and believe I can be believable.”