Jim Carrey’s Trump resistance
Actor wields a mighty pen with caricatures
Jim Carrey built his career filling movie theaters, but lately he’s drawing his biggest audiences with tweeted drawings protesting President Donald Trump and his allies.
Carrey, a movie star who returns to series TV with Showtime’s “Kidding” (Sunday, 10 EDT/PDT), doesn’t see political art as a career move, but instead as his compulsion to speak against an administration he considers evil.
Carrey’s first caricature, an image of Trump as a killer clown with his finger on the (presumably nuclear) button, was published in a magazine the day before the 2016 president election. After Trump’s surprise victory, he veered in the opposite direction: “I just chaotically scribbled my face in just complete disillusionment and worry about what happened.”
Over time, “The Truman Show” star, 56, accelerated his output, which he shares with his 17.9 million Twitter followers (@JimCarrey).
To date, he’s done more than 150 drawings, from whimsical –Trump’s face as a piece of toast – to crude (one depicts the president puckering up next to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s bare behind).
While Trump is Carrey’s favorite subject, presidential allies including Fox News host Sean Hannity, personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani and Vice President Mike Pence, have faced the wrath of his pen. Others, including special prosecutor Robert Mueller, have received flattering portraits.
The illustrations, which Carrey draws with felt-tip markers, are fueled by inspiration. “They just keep coming. They just happen. Some concern comes up and some twist comes out of the news,” he says.
Carrey has some favorites, including a March 29 offering captioned, “You Scream. I Scream. Will We Ever Stop Screaming?,” in which a bare-chested president appears overly excited about getting two scoops of ice cream, and another in which an authority figure holds a severed cat’s tail and asks a child-size, pajama-clad presidential aide Stephen Miller: “Stephen … Where’s the rest of the cat?”
“I love the ice cream drawing that I submitted to the Smithsonian as a presidential portrait,” he says with a mischievous grin. Of the cartoon featuring Miller, drawn when the separation of children from parents at the Mexican border became a front-page story, Carrey says, “When evil is encouraged to flourish, sociopaths rise to the top and you get all kinds of crazies.”
Although many of the drawings exemplify Carrey’s anger and even rage, he says he has a social-media fail-safe. His assistant controls his Twitter account and she and some friends look at his art and commentary before they are posted.
“They have opinions. Sometimes, they go, ‘Go!’ And sometimes they go, ‘Don’t do it!’, which I think everybody needs. You could make a job out of being a Twitter proofreader. The president needs one of those,” he says.
Carrey hasn’t heard any reaction to the drawings from the president.
“He’s a narcissist. It could go either way. He could love it … because it’s about him,” he says, musing he might get a reaction if he focused his attention solely on drawings of Sen. John McCain, whom Carrey honored after his death with a laudatory portrayal. “When people say (Trump) is a narcissist and we should ignore him: No. Black out Donald Trump for a week and you’ll see war with North Korea.”
Carrey says he’s received support for the drawings, 80 of which will be featured in a Los Angeles exhibition “IndigNation,” on display from Oct. 13-Nov. 10.
He’s experienced plenty of opposition, too. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee expressed outrage over Car- rey’s March 17 drawing of his daughter, president press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and called Carrey a “pathetic, bully, hater, bigot and Christaphobe.”
Carrey disagrees with those who criticize his depiction of Sanders.
“They tried to turn it into something I should be ashamed of. But it wasn’t something I could be ashamed of because liars are liars and ugly starts on the inside,” he says. “I wasn’t drawing an ugly person; I was drawing a person who had become ugly.”
Some of the objections are considered; some aren’t, he says.
“I value criticism. But some of it’s just sick. And you’ll get yourself worked up over a comment and you’ll realize it could just as easily be a bot,” he says.
But there’s a rawness and freshness to social media — “another place to play, another canvas” — that he relishes.
“Twitter is like having an open front door and a sign that says, ‘If you want to kick me in the stomach, feel free,’” he says. “But I’m the one doing the kicking right now.”
“(Illustrations) just keep coming. ... Some concern comes up and some twist comes out of the news.”