The Hobbit star Martin Freeman has attacked fellow actor Jim Carrey over his on-set behavior on the 1999 movie Man on the Moon, in which Carrey played the late comedian Andy Kaufman.
In an interview on the “Off Menu” podcast, Martin Freeman criticized the great lengths that Jim Carrey took to embody Andy Kaufman, including staying in character in between takes.
Carrey’s behavior on the movie was explored in the Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond. The documentary showed how Carrey blurred the line between Kaufman and himself to such an extent that it frustrated director Milos Forman and his other colleagues.
“I’m genuinely sure Jim Carrey is lovely and smart person” Freeman said. “But it was the most self-aggrandizing, selfish fucking narcissistic bullocks I’ve ever seen. And the idea that anything in our culture would celebrate that or support it is deranged.”
He added: “You’re not supposed to become the fucking character because you’re supposed to be open to stuff that happens in real life because someone at some point is going to say ‘Cut’ and there’s no point going, ‘What does ‘cut’ mean because I’m Napoleon?’ Shut up.”
Freeman called such behavior “amateurish.”
“You need to keep grounded in reality and that’s not to say you don’t lose yourself at the time in between action and cut but the rest of it is absolutely pretentious nonsense,” the actor said. “I think it’s highly amateurish. It’s essentially an amateurish notion because for me it’s not a professional attitude. Get the job done man, fucking do your work.”
He added: “Can you imagine if he had been anybody else? He would have been sectioned, let alone fired. He would have been got rid of.”
Jim Carrey was one of Hollywood’s most vocal anti-Trump activists, using his social media accounts to mock the former president and other Republicans through a series of grotesque and sometimes obscene political caricatures.
Carrey won a Golden Globe for his performance in Man on the Moon but failed to score an Oscar nomination despite being widely praised.
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