Lord Jim

Filming of Forever, featuring new Batman Val Kilmer, doesn't begin until September, but Carrey is already thinking of how he wants to look. "I've got to get in shape, for one thing, because I don't exactly know what the Riddler costume is going to look like, but if it's skintight, I don't want to have to wear a sash around my midsection.

"I have this other idea, though. You know how some people cut words and shapes into their hair? I want to carve a big question mark into the top of my head, and the period of the question mark would be made from the hair on the back of my neck."

Er, gee, great idea, Jim.

"But that may not work out," says Carrey, scratching his chin, thinking hard. "My hair may not grow back in time for me to do Ace Ventura 2. Plus, I may be in divorce court around that time and I don't think that's a great way to show respect for the judge, with a big question mark on my head. 'Excuse me, your honor, I don't mean to question your judgment...'"

Separated for more than a year, Carrey is in the process of winding up a divorce from his actress wife of eight years, Melissa; they have a 6-year-old daughter, Jane. "It's really difficult to be married to someone like me — you know, I'm trying to think up some new stunt when I should be taking out the garbage," he says. "Creative people just don't behave very well generally. I mean, when my marriage started falling apart, I started looking around for examples of solid relationships. I'd go 'Look at Tom Cruise — he's handled the movie-star thing and the marriage thing pretty solidly.' Then it was pointed out that he'd divorced Mimi Rogers. My point is, if you're looking for examples of good behavior in show business, you're gonna get depressed real fast."

These bleak thoughts are interrupted by his publicist, who wants to know whether a crew from Entertainment Tonight can come by and film him as he's being photographed for a magazine cover. "No," says Carrey quickly. "That's too many things going on at once. Will be playing to the TV cameras or the photographer's camera? Forget it." He grins. "You wouldn't believe the dumb requests I get now — reporters wanting to interview me as we walk through a pet store; they want me to stroll along Melrose Avenue and make fun of Melrose Place. Why would I want to do that? Sheesh."

Already shrewd about the star-making machinery gearing up around him, Carrey remains an open curious fellow. "He's like a human sponge," says Cage, "in that he absorbs everything around him." Sometimes this calls for some field research. A few years ago, Carrey, Cage, and Crispin Glover decided to visit a Church of Scientology on Hollywood Boulevard. "I tell you, that was a scene, man," says Carrey. "The three of us walked in, and these Scientology people thought they'd died and gone to heaven. Crispin said" — here Carrey breaks into Glover's quavery, hesitant voice — "'We'd like to, ah...look at, ah, the training film.' And they said, 'Oh, yes, come right this way.'"

"They led us into this little theater and they showed us the Scientology promotional film and I watched Karen Black and different celebrities with this glazed look in their eyes talking about how Scientology saved their lives, saying things like 'I'm not workin', but I'm happy!' It was completely frightening." Cage remembers it as "a strange day."

Had Carrey ever contemplated becoming a Scientologist? "No, but I don't know why I say that — I've tried everything else. I've done therapy, I've done colonics, I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon — to fill the colors in my aura. I found myself driving around to L.A. ribbon stores saying to myself, 'What am I doing?'

"What else? Let's see. Did the Prozac thing. It was very helpful at a certain point. You may worry that it doesn't let you feel the highs and lows that inspire your creativity, but when your lows are so low, you become immobile — you're not creating anything anyway."

Had he felt that low a lot? "Not recently," he says, laughing. Quite the opposite, he's starting to live out the fantasies that accrue to movie-star success, such as being a pop singer-songwriter. He croons the disco-salsa "Cuban Pete" on the soundtrack to The Mask, a shrewd collection of hip acts and hot beats that ought to further increase Mask revenues. Carrey, who also paints and sculpts in spare moments, pursues songwriting with some seriousness. A tune he cowrote is being recorded by the cult-fave acoustic duo Tuck & Patti for their next release. "I get the kid audience with Ace, then I pull in that big New Age crowd with Tuck & Patti," Carrey cracks. "There's no limit to my outreach!"

For someone who took 15 years to become an overnight star, Carrey seems unusually free of bitterness toward his fad-chasing industry. "I don't keep an enemies list of people who turned me down for jobs," he says. "That kind of stuff gives you cancer. You've got to realize coming into this business that no one's going to take a chance on you. You have to prove you have the goods. People in Hollywood are driven by the heat of success. It's nothing personal. It's not like anyone goes out of his way to screw you. It's just that you have to be the most popular, talented guy in the room at the exact moment they need you.

And what if, say, 10 years from now, Jim Carrey is longer giving off that toasty success vibe?

"You know my worst nightmare?" he says. "I end up in a sitcom called Jim's Place. I'm from outer space — an intergalactic cop who crashed into the Chicago River and meets up with an earthling cop and solves crimes. That would be pretty bad. Oh, and if you ever hear that I signed up to do Ace Ventura 5, call me up and remind me to put a bullet in my head, okay?"