Desperation

Desperate times call for desperate measures – and for Jim Carrey’s character in “Fun with Dick & Jane,” that means dressing up like the female half of singing duo Sonny and Cher.

“My daughter came to visit me on the set when I was doing the Cher thing, and she was like, ‘Dad, this is going to cause damage. You are the ugliest woman I have ever seen in my life,’ ” he says.

Although Carrey is always game to look silly, he found that dressing in drag for the film, which opens in theaters today, was an unexpected challenge.

“I gained a lot of respect for women and their high heels,” he says. “It is a torture chamber, man.

“Those were like a good four inches. So I was in pain. I was in extreme agony.

“I was struttin’. It just didn’t look good.”

Dressing as the Bob Mackie-clad diva is just one of the many disguises Dick Harper (Carrey) wears in the movie.

After his boss (Alec Baldwin) at Globodyne destroys the company through shady business dealings, Dick and his wife, Jane (Tea Leoni), don various costumes to commit robberies to pay creditors and finance their upper-middle-class lifestyle.

As a fan of the 1977 film of the same name starring Jane Fonda and George Segal, Carrey approached producer Brian Grazer about a remake that would feature 21st-century concerns.

“With Enron and all those corporate scams that have gone on and the people that have been affected by that, I just thought it was a perfect idea and a fun idea,” explains Carrey.

“The movie is about two people breaking their chains and throwing caution to the wind and throwing the rules out the window, which we can’t do in our lives.”

In the film, Carrey is put through numerous physically taxing situations beyond just wearing high heels.

He’s chased by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, jumps onto a moving truck, dodges rolling water-cooler jugs on a staircase and plummets from a light fixture.

“I always hurt myself during a movie. Low-grade injuries all the time. That just comes with the territory,” he says.

“On ‘Me, Myself & Irene,’ I did the entire movie on a severely sprained ankle and bruised from head to foot.

“I’m always banging myself up. It’s like the X-Games.”

Despite this occupational hazard, Carrey doesn’t think age will slow down his physical comedy.

“I keep myself in shape; I feel good,” he says. “I can do some crazy stuff.

“Nothing is too brittle yet. My bones aren’t porous yet.”

Despite achieving international stardom and earning millions, Carrey can identify with Dick’s dire situation and reckless state of mind.

“I’ve had moments in my life where everything looked so bleak it was insane,” he says.

“We lived in a van for a while as a family when I was growing up. At that point we had hit the poverty line, so while I was going to school, I was a security guard and a janitor at a steel truck rim-making factory.

“There were just a lot of factions in the factory … who all hated each other and would defecate in the sink for me because they knew I had to clean up. It was pretty hard to take.”

In the film, Dick also devises a way to get back at his former boss, hitting him where it hurts most: his checkbook.

Like his character, Carrey has had thoughts of revenge against those who’ve mistreated him over the years.

“I was thinking about fixing some brakes out there. I was pretty angry. But, I never really went through with it,” he says.

“There are sometimes moments of those ‘I’ll show them’ sort of thing, but generally by the time you get the opportunity to show them, you’re over it.

“There is just no room for that in my life.”