Look, I'm all about asking for what your worth. As a semi-recent grad, I've seen all my friends struggle with the "asking" part of interviews and job acceptances, and I've heard a few grisly stories, including one of my friends who was cheerfully told by her boss at a happy hour several months after her hire that they had been prepared to offer her more if she'd "pushed harder," and that her male co-workers who asked for more got it. (Nice to know that the gender wage gap is alive and well.) But as irritating as a few thousand dollars difference in salary is, it is nowhere near as shockingly large as the difference in what Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey made in Dumb and Dumber.
The alleged story behind the difference in their pay grades is enough to give you a headache. The first Dumb and Dumber came out in 1994, right on the heels of Carrey's extremely successful movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Apparently the producers of Dumb and Dumber wanted to cast Carrey from the start, and asked for $350,000. Any normal person would've been like, "Sold!" and game over, but Carrey wanted $400,000. Eventually they buckled, only to have Carrey demand $500,000, and then $750,000, and so on and so forth until he racked up – drumroll please, folks – $7 million for that movie, or just a little less than half of the movie's entire budget.
Jeff Daniels, on the other hand? He earned $50,000.
Half the internet is going to hate me for this, but in light of finding this out, I feel like I have to say: I don't find Jim Carrey that funny. Watching Ace Ventura was the closest I ever came to falling asleep while babysitting, and ever since that weird video he posted about Emma Stone as a "joke," I can't not think of him as a total creep. Here's hoping that Jeff Daniels gets paid a hell of a lot more for the Dumb and Dumber sequel slated for a November 14th release, especially since the last one ended up grossing $247 million.
Images: New Line Cinema; Giphy
