Jim Carrey admits there’s one film he regrets making

Jim Carrey is one of the most successful actors of all time, with movies like The Truman Show and The Mask among the most iconic of the 1990s.

Still, when your career spans more than 40 years, you’re bound to make some mistakes along the way. Hindsight is, after all, a wonderful thing.

And whilst the 62-year-old Grinch star should be, overall, pretty content with his success (don't mention Dumb and Dumber to), he has admitted that there’s one project he regrets taking on.

Carrey played Sal Bertolinni (aka born-again Christian Colonel Stars and Stripes) in the 2013 sequel to the action blockbuster Kick-Ass.

The film admittedly garnered mixed reviews from critics, yet it earned $60.8 million (around £39 million at the time) at the box office so did pretty well for all concerned.

The American-Canadian actor is one of Hollywood's biggest stars of all time(Getty Images)

However, just before Kick-Ass 2’s release, Carrey denounced the movie on Twitter (now X), telling his 10.8 million followers that he had suffered a crisis of conscience about the whole thing.

“I did Kickass (sic) a month [before] Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence,” he wrote at the time.

“I meant to say my apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”

His shock statement, penned in June 2013, came less than two months before the movie’s release date and six months after the devastating Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people at an elementary school in Connecticut.

The horrors of Sandy Hook ignited protests about gun control across the US(Getty Images)

Both Kick-Ass films, based on Scottish writer Mark Millar’s comic book series, divided opinion with their stylised violence and the age of their young protagonists.

Chloë Grace Moretz was only 13 when she took up the role of Hit-Girl, a ruthless vigilante trained by her former cop father to help bring down a notorious crime boss and his son.

Millar, who also serves as executive producer for the films, admitted he was “baffled” by Carrey’s public condemnation.

He wrote in a forum on his website at the time: “As you may know, Jim is a passionate advocate of gun control and I respect both his politics and his opinion, but I’m baffled by this sudden announcement as nothing seen in this picture wasn’t in the screenplay 18 months ago.

“Yes, the body count is very high, but a movie called Kick-Ass 2 really has to do what it says on the tin. A sequel to the picture that gave us Hit Girl was always going to have some blood on the floor and this should have been no shock to a guy who enjoyed the first movie so much…”

He continued: "Like Jim, I'm horrified by real-life violence (even though I'm Scottish), but Kick-Ass 2 isn't a documentary. No actors were harmed in the making of this production!

"This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorsese and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Chan-wook Park, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless body count of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the CONSEQUENCES of violence…

"Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can't be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action movie."

Carrey played Colonel Stars and Stripes in Kick-Ass 2(Universal Pictures)

Since then, Carrey has stepped back from the limelight, telling The Hollywood Reporter that he lost his passion for acting in the mid-2010s.

"I just didn't want to be in the business anymore. I didn't like what was happening, the corporations taking over and all that," Carrey said back in 2018.

Then, after something of a comeback that same year, when he starred in and produced the comedy-drama series Kidding, and went on to play the villain in the Sonicmovie adaptations, he announced in 2022 that he had plans to retire from the game altogether.

"I feel like I have enough, I've done enough, I am enough," he told Access Hollywood.

"I really like my quiet life," he added, describing his new-found passion: painting.

Still, he left an opening, admitting: "If the angels bring some sort of script that's written in gold ink that says to me that it's going to be really important for people to see, I might continue down the road.

But, he stressed: “I'm taking a break."

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