Steve Martin and Martin Short Were Offered ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ As Were Two Other Unexpected Actors
· Vice
For filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly, getting their first movie off the ground was quite a process. It all began with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles director John Hughes selling the pair an unfinished script he’d been working on called Ski Nuts. At that stage, it was nothing more than a rough idea about two idiots in Aspen, Colorado; the Farrellys later developed it into their 1994 hit Dumb and Dumber. Hughes loved what they came up with, but threatened them with a million-dollar fine if they used his name to promote the film.
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Then came the problem of getting people to read the script, which they solved only after changing the title to A Power Tool Is Not a Toy. The other half of the battle was casting the movie, which took years in and of itself. When asked how many actors turned down their offers, Peter Farrelly estimated, “A hundred, 150. Everyone. Everybody that was anyone.” He further explained that people’s agents might have been to blame for at least some of the rejections they got. “It’s rare that they actually give [scripts] to [the actors],” Peter said. “So [it’s] hard to tell how many actually passed, but we were told 100.”
Two actors who were reportedly attached to the project early on were Steve Martin and Martin Short. Sources differ, however, on whether they were intended to star together or if they were both offered the Jim Carrey role. It was Carrey’s name, though, that ultimately got the movie made. “Once Jim Carrey got attached, suddenly New Line wanted to be involved,” screenwriter Bennett Yellin told The Telegraph in 2024. The Farrellys didn’t know much about Carrey because he wasn’t as famous at the time, but according to Peter, “He read the script and totally responded to it in a way that we hoped somebody would one day.”
There was just one catch: Carrey didn’t want to co-star with another comedian. From his perspective, two comics would be constantly trying to top each other, and he felt it would be better to cast a straight actor to focus more on the buddy-buddy aspect. One of Carrey’s choices for Harry was Nicolas Cage, with whom he’d worked in Peggy Sue Got Married. When Cage turned it down in favor of doing Leaving Las Vegas, Carrey suggested his future A Christmas Carol co-star, Gary Oldman, for the part. “In retrospect that would’ve been great!” Yellin said years later.
Jeff Daniels, of course, ended up playing Harry, but even that almost didn’t come to be. “Jeff Daniels was not the obvious choice because he hadn’t done any, you know, out and out comedies before that,” Bobby Farrelly recalled. “[The studio] didn’t want Jeff Daniels because they couldn’t see what we saw,” said Yellin. “They absolutely didn’t want him to do it. New Line lowballed him. But he wanted to change things up and wanted to work with Jim Carrey.”
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