Canadian comedian Jim Carrey has compiled a wildly varied filmography during a career that has spanned nearly four decades, from mid-1980s comedies like Once Bitten and Peggy Sue Got Married to his breakout role as pet detective Ace Ventura in a pair of mid-1990s comedies to more dramatic parts in mid-2000s films like The Number 23 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
He’s played comic book characters Edward “The Riddler” Nygma, Stanley “The Mask” Ipkiss, and Sal “Colonel Stars & Stripes” Bertolinni, and animated characters Ebenezer Scrooge and Horton the Elephant. Carrey has also played real-life personalities twice, portraying performance artist Andy Kaufman in 1999’s Man on the Moon, for which he won his second Golden Globe Award, and con artist Steven Jay Russell in 2009’s I Love You Phillip Morris, for which he did not, and now he appears to be in talks to take on a third biographical project as beloved children’s author and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr. Seuss.
The actor has a fair bit of familiarity with the bibliography of Seuss, of course, having played the King of Sinful Sots in Ron Howard’s 2000 adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas as well as his aforementioned voice work as the title character of Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino’s 2008 animated film Horton Hears a Who! Having already portrayed characters borne from Seuss’s vast imagination, Carrey is now interested in depicting the man himself in Seuss, a film to be directed by novelist and director Stephen Chbosky.
The story, scripted by Jonathon E. Stewart and Eyal Podell, who also both contributed to the screenplay for Sony’s Angry Birds Movie 2, is said to follow Geisel’s development as a writer in the 1920s, which was greatly shaped by his relationship with fellow children’s author Helen Marion Palmer, who, after a thirteen-year battle with various illnesses including cancer and the discovery that her husband had engaged in an affair, ultimately committed suicide by overdose in October of 1967. The script placed third (or fourth, if you account for the two screenplays that tied for second) on the 2012 Black List, and has been regarded as one of Hollywood’s most promising un-produced scripts ever since.
And after turning in performances like Truman Burbank in 1998’s The Truman Show, for which he won the first of his back-to-back Golden Globes, making him one of the few actors who has won the award for both comedy and drama, James Eugene Carrey may be just the man to breathe new life into the project.
Closer to home, though, Carrey stars in Sonic the Hedgehog as the villainous Dr. Ivo Robotnik, debuting February 14th, shortly after the second season of his Showtime dramedy series Kidding premieres on February 9th.
