Jim Carrey not only goes dark in The Number 23 but he plays a dual role too. He’s Walter, the ordinary dad who becomes obsessed with the title number, and Fingerling, the detective in the book he reads about the number. For a man of 1000 faces and voices, two was actually a modest number.
Jim Carrey on The Number 23
“I love Walter because he’s the family guy,” said Carrey. “He’s the guy who wants to have a normal life. He’s most of us who want just things to be stable. We’re in a constant state of denial that we live on plates of rock that are floating on molten magma and nothing is stable in the universe, we just want to keep things from moving too much, or changing too much. So I like that character, he was very loving with his family and he loved his job. But the other character was a little bit different for me to play, so that’s exciting for me. I did like Fingerling, and Jenny liked it. It’s amazing what a tattoo does for a girl.”
Fingerling is a hard boiled noir-ish character, but Carrey didn’t base him on any films. “I thought that if I was in that position, if I was that guy, how I would see myself and how basically it would bleed into your hair and into your eyes and into everything about you. The coat, all the choices are choices that somebody makes because of what is going on in their spirit. Every choice we make is based on that. The colors we wear, everything. It just bleeds into everything. It starts with a lie the person believes about themselves or the delusion they are living with or the pain that they have kind of accumulated. Things they are not dealing with. It all creeps out in certain ways.”
The Number 23
The Number 23
The Number 23
The Number 23
The Number 23
Carrey makes certain musical choices to get into such characters. “I found the song in that’s in the movie, the theme song of Fabrizia and Fingerling [She Wants Revenge] which I just heard that and that rocks. That’s so cool. But, yeah, I use music a lot and it was fun too. It’s interesting too. I think everybody creates the character. I mean, [the director] creates the character, people on the set, the lighting, everything creates character. So, the sound people on the movie, they were so excited when I came to them and I said, ‘For certain scenes, I want an earwig with music blasting in my ear during the scene.’ And they go, ‘What, what are you talking about?’ And I go, ‘Seriously, like the weirdest things you can possibly find. Like, disturbing sounds, things that are really horrifying that really unnerve you.’ And they were like, ‘Great, man…’ and they went away and they came up with the wonderful collection of sound bytes and things like that of different things happening and music. And, so I would use them at certain scenes. And at times I would also, in the scene where I’m kind of going crazy by myself in the hotel room, I would get Joel [Schumacher], I would have that music, and I would get Joel in my ear just messing with me, just trying to screw me up, like talk to me at times when I’m trying to concentrate on certain things. And I literally ended up at certain times telling him to go f*ck himself and stuff like that, because it would so get in my way that it would be unnerving, but that’s what I wanted.”
The character’s musical inklings towards the saxophone were all faked though. “I just really practiced some rudimentary things that I could do that would match the music, but I didn’t learn how to play the sax. I used to play the sax, oddly enough. There are parallels all over the place. My father used to be an accountant. He played the saxophone in a band. He had an orchestra. He played the saxophone. So, there were these parallels. I don’t know how many of them were in there. So, there were all these parallels going on anyway. I played in the school band but I forgot how to play it.”
The Number 23 opens to theatres February 23rd.
For the trailer, poster and more movie info, go to The
Number 23 Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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