Carrey’s quirky comic abilities help to keep ‘Lemony’ fresh

Jim Carrey loves scaring kids.

He’s played the Grinch in “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the Riddler in “Batman Forever,” the maniacal superhero in “The Mask.”

And now he’s the sinister Count Olaf in “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

“I remember when I was a kid just loving creepy movies that scared me and at the same time were funny,” says Carrey. “I remember ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ with that … Children Catcher, who was trying to entice kids out with candy and kidnap them.”

Now he’s playing the nemesis of three orphaned children from a series of books that rivals “Harry Potter” in popularity.

In the “Lemony Snicket” series, Olaf takes custody of the children and then tries to kill them in order to inherit their parents’ fortune.

Carrey says that he modeled the character after a little bit of Orson Welles, a bit of the cartoon cereal box character Count Chocula, and bit of a bird of prey. Physically, however, he turned out a bit more familiar.

“I turned out looking like my dad, actually, which is really freaky,” he says.

For Carrey, playing dress-up is like Christmas every day.

“I love transforming – it’s like Christmas morning to me,” he says. “You get into the make-up trailer, and you start playing around with things and throwing pieces together.

“At one point we had a Don King wig on backward strapped to the back of my head and I look like a … hood ornament from a Chevy, it was weird. But we experimented. We came up with 30 different characters that didn’t get into the movie.”

Carrey says he’s sad that so many extra characters he created never were used in the film, and hopes for that reason he may be asked to reprise his role in a sequel.

“There was a lot of improvisation, there’s a ton of stuff that’s not in the movie that is really funny, I have to kill babies,” he pauses, thinking that someone may think his character does that in the film. He deadpans, “They call it killing babies in Hollywood, where the baby’s got to die. I didn’t really, actually kill a baby, let’s get that straight, it’s a figurative baby, a funny joke baby.”

This year, his other movie baby was the romantic drama “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which forced him into his deepest emotional moments on film.

“The feeling of loss that the character was going through allowed me to be less accessible as a person on film,” Carrey says. “Generally, I play fairly colorful characters who come out of the screen, and this one was inviting you to come in.”

Coming up, he’s signed to do a big-screen version of “The Six Million Dollar Man” and remakes of “Fun With Dick and Jane” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

“I don’t think of myself as changing the world with this stuff,” he says, “but I know that people can enjoy themselves for a couple of hours.”

The birthday bunch

Comedian Charlie Callas is 77. Drummer Peter Criss (Kiss) is 59. Actor John Spencer (“The West Wing”) is 58. Actor Michael Badalucco (“The Practice”) is 50. Actress Blanche Baker (“Shakedown,” “Holocaust”) is 48. Singer Billy Bragg is 47. Singer-bassist Mike Watt (The Minutemen, fIREHOSE) is 47. Singer Chris Robinson (Black Crowes) is 38. Singer JoJo is 14.