Before The Cable Guy came out, most everyone knew Carrey had been paid what was an astronomical amount at the time to star in it: $20 million. But as Judd Apatow, one of the writers brought in to work on the script, noted at the time, if Sony thought it was getting a typically freewheeling Jim Carrey vehicle, the studio was in for a surprise. As Apatow told The New York Times, “Jim said, ‘I can’t keep repeating myself. My audience is going to get bored. I can’t keep making Ace Ventura. If I don’t progress as a creative person, I’m going to go stale and the audience won’t come anyway.’”
Indeed, his performance as Chip was far darker than his earlier work, although there were some hints of it from the previous year’s Batman Forever, in which he played an unhinged Riddler. But where his earlier work was appealingly outrageous, Chip was unsettling and unlovable — a guy meant to make you recoil. The Cable Guy was hardly a bomb, but its brand of dark comedy scared off lots of folks who loved the Carrey of The Mask or Dumb and Dumber. The movie is a cult favorite now, of course — Carrey even reprised his role for a 2022 Super Bowl ad — but back then, it served as an early warning for his fans: He had no problem subverting their expectations, trusting his instincts rather than worrying about what others wanted from him.