Jim is our greatest miser

JIM Carrey comes into the room, spies one of the giant fake snowballs in the Christmas decorations, picks it up and hurls it into the room with a grin. So far, so expected.

We’re used to the star of such movies as The Mask, Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty refusing to act seriously. He’s a clown whether or not the cameras are focused on him.

Today, though, he’s unusually restrained, snowball-throwing aside.

Talkative, but giving serious answers to questions about his eight-character marathon in Disney’s A Christmas Carol.

Scrooge is his main role in director Robert Zemeckis’s version of the Dicken classic, shot in performance capture – which digitally captures what the actors are doing with computerised cameras – and 3D. It allows Carrey to play the miser as both a seven-year-old and an old man.

For good measure, he plays all three unearthly visitors (Ghosts of Crhistmas Past, Present and Yet To Come) who try to frighten Scrooge into changing his anti-social ways.

The challenge, says Carrey, was to make the characters real.

“Generally, what I think about most people is that we walk around believing a lie about ourselves from a very early age. Scrooge’s lie is that he wasn’t worth loving. And so he couldn’t afford to believe in love because he didn’t get it.

“So, that’s a wonderful place to start. I also wanted him to appear to be irredeemable, which is a difficult task after you’ve seen this story so many times. I think we got there.

But playing all the different characters was such a huge challenge.”

Then we get to what is perhaps the reason for his less-zany-than-usual behaviour. He’s anxious that we Brits approve. After all, it’s “our”

story being remade by Americans.

“It’s really important to me that people in the UK enjoy this beautiful story again,” he adds.

“There’s the challenge of Scrooge having been done before. You hope some day that your version, the one you were involved with, will be considered the best one ever. People will have different opinions about that. I was in excellent hands, I didn’t feel frightened. I was excited by the technology and now I’ve seen the film, where it goes, I want to do it again.”

For Scrooge, he chose to bring out the pronunciation. “It had a little bit of an exaggeration. I thought someone like Scrooge would be very careful to speak correctly. I wanted his words also to cut like a knife.”

The silent Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come was a tribute to Marcel Marceau, he jokes. “Christmas Present was a Yorkshire accent – from Sheffield – because I felt he was really connected to the common man.

And the need of the common man to party and to enjoy the Christmas season. Really no one enjoys it like the common man, so I felt that was appropriate.

“As for the Ghost of Christmas Past and the accent from the garden of Ireland, which was a very gentle dreamy voice, was really a tribute to my Irish roots. I put a little bit of myself in there.”

His favourite Scrooge from the past is Alastair Sim – “he was just born to play the part” – who took the role in the 1951 British film.

The performance capture process means that an actor can be made to look quite unlike his real self. Carrey is just about recognisable beneath pointed chin, huge nose and wrinkles.

“That’s the wonderful thing about the digital process, I can be cast in films I could never been cast in otherwise. I can be cast in parts I can’t play. If I have it in my soul, it doesn’t matter what my face looks like.

“The challenges of the technique are that you have to create the world in your head, everything. It really is a challenge in that regard because it’s an odd thing to stare at your acting partners and have these two prongs sticking out of your head with four HD cameras so close to your face.

“There are also amazing benefits because you can do a whole scene.

You can do 20 scenes in a day. It’s crazy. It’s like doing a play. You have to know it. It’s the first time really that I’ve had to know a script before I started.”

Clearly, the huge responsibility of creating an iconic character in what he calls “one of the greatest stories ever written”, played on his mind.

“I just had a feeling that if I was true to my own thoughts of the character it would pop out as something different. Actually, not behaviourally, but the character looks exactly like my father. It is so spooky to me.

“My family will freak out when they see this thing. If you take away the pointed nose and chin it’s my father, so I got a glimpse of what I’ll look like when I’m old.”

He gets to play Scrooge as both a schoolboy and a curmudgeonly old man, by which time he’s a complex character. “You know, we create these layers to protect ourselves. I always believe that lie I mentioned kind of sneaks into the oyster shell like a little speck of sand and you form your whole personality around that and try to figure out how to get past that.

“So, that becomes pretty complex when you get to Scrooge’s age. When it came to Scrooge as a young boy, I tried to stay in a place of still hoping.

“There was sadness and loneliness, but he still hung on to hope. And then as he gets older, you see that hope fade. By the time he’s 35 there’s an edge in his voice and his being that reveals that he’s given up hope.”

■ Disney’s A Christmas Carol (PG) opens in cinemas tomorrow.