‘The Mask’ at 25: Why the Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz hit was the ‘Deadpool’ of its time
25 years later, team recalls making of ‘The Mask’
When Jerry Evans was hired to choreograph the blockbuster superhero comedy “The Mask,” which celebrates its 25th anniversary this summer, he was surprised when director Chuck Russell informed him he was secretly making a musical.
“I said, ‘Secretly?’ ” recalled Evans, adding that Russell admitted that “I haven’t told anybody other than you and my producer. We’ll just tell everybody when it’s time, I guess.’ He had a plan. I said, ‘Sounds good to me. I love it.’ ”
And so did audiences and critics in the summer of 1994.
Variety’s review called the showcase for Jim Carrey’s talents “adroitly directed, viscerally and visually dynamic and just plain fun.”
Based on the popular Dark Horse comic book series of the same name, “The Mask” turned Carrey into a superstar as the sweet, nebbish, cartoon-loving loan officer Stanley Ipkiss, who turns into a green-faced human cartoon when he dons a magical mask he found.
The masked Stanley is a human Tex Avery cartoon, a zootsuited dynamo who cracks wise and dances a la Carmen Miranda to the Desi Arnaz song “Cuban Pete.”
“The Mask” introduced movie audiences to a young model named Cameron Diaz as Tina, the object of Stanley’s affections.
She proved to be a contemporary Carole Lombard, and her career took off like a rocket. Peter Greene played her boyfriend, the vile gangster Dorian Tyrell, and comic Richard Jeni was Stanley’s best friend Charlie.
Rounding out the cast was a charmer named Max, a Jack Russell terrier, who played Stanley’s beloved pet, Milo.
Featuring Oscar- and BAFTAnominated visual effects and colorful BAFTA-nominated production design, “The Mask” made over $351 million worldwide — not bad for production budgeted at $23 million.
Animation historian Jerry Beck noted “The Mask” was the perfect follow-up for a “film like ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ which was a gigantic sensation of 1988. It wasn’t really anything, on one hand, like ‘Roger Rabbit.’ On the other hand, it was a lot like it. It had a crime noir plot and cartoon references.”
“The Mask,” he added, “is a great combination of great source material, both the comic book and the Tex Avery cartoons and the unbelievable great casting of Jim Carrey. It’s interesting looking back at the film now — it’s really the precursor to ‘Deadpool’ in a lot of ways.”
Stanley, he said, “talks to the audience” like Ryan Reynolds’ masked Deadpool.
“They break the fourth wall. He’s doing all these cartoony insane things. He’s a crime fighter, a superhero in a dark way like Deadpool.”
It was Russell who envisioned “The Mask” as a comedy.
Though he had been a producer on the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy hit “Back to School,” Russell had earned acclaimed for New Line’s 1987 horror flick, “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.” And the then- indie studio was looking to create another horror franchise like “Elm Street” with the popular and violent Dark Horse comic book series.
In the comic, said Russell, “the character would put on the mask, have a couple of scary, but funny lines and then chop people up with an ax. The original Dark Horse comic is something they used to call ‘Splatterpunk,’ which I felt was very inspired by Freddy Krueger and the ‘Elm Street’ series. But it also had a unique look and vision of its own.”
His entire concept of doing “The Mask” as a comedy rather than the horror film New Line imagined was inspired by Carrey’s work in stand-up and on Fox’s sketch comedy series “In Living
Color.”
Before he hired Carrey, though, he had to convince New Line of “two or three things that were very different for them at the time — that was using this (new digital) technology and doing ‘The Mask’ as a comedy rather than a horror film.”
Russell had hoped that “The Mask” would be Carrey’s first film. “I was very excited about that because I knew Jim from seeing his stand-up, which was almost unbelievable, just what he was doing physically on stage,” he said.
But because the development took a long time, Carrey went off to make “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” which was a huge box office hit when it opened in early 1994.
According to casting director Fern Champion, Russell wanted the late Anna Nicole Smith for Tina. But Russell says that though he was curious about Smith, she was not a choice “as I would have had to read her for the part to get that far.”
Champion said she was looking at the top models of the day without any luck. So, she asked a friend who had a modeling agency in the same building as the New Line offices if she had anybody to recommend. “There is one gal,” she was told. And that gal was Diaz.
When they met in Champion’s office, the casting director realized she had “instant likability.”
Diaz wasn’t the only performer who made her film debut in “The Mask.” So did feature director Anne Fletcher (“Step Up” “The Proposal,” “Dumplin’”) who was at the time a dancer and assistant to choreographer director Adam Shankman.
She played a dancing cop on the “Cuban Pete” number.
“We had the best time ever,” recalled Fletcher.