Jim Carrey has kept a quiet profile in recent years, stepping away from the Hollywood spotlight to create politically charged paintings and grow a thick beard. With his new Showtime program Kidding airing later this month, the beloved actor’s beard is no longer present, and he is ready to return to the small and big screens.

Carrey, 56, detailed his extended absence from the entertainment world in a wide-ranging cover story for The Hollywood Reporter.

“I just didn’t want to be in the business anymore,” the Dumb and Dumber star said. “I didn’t like what was happening, the corporations taking over and all that. And maybe it’s because I felt pulled toward a different type of creative outlet and I really liked the control of painting — of not having a committee in the way telling me what the idea must be to appeal to a four-quadrant whatever.”

Carrey used to be the biggest star in Hollywood. He was the first actor to earn $20 million a picture, and he had a series of blockbuster films around 20 years ago that are now considered comic classics.

Carrey appeared in three films in 1994: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. He went on to feature in films such as Liar Liar, The Truman Show, Man in the Moon, and numerous more, solidifying his status as Hollywood royalty and one of the greatest comic performers of all time.

Jim Carrey | CREDIT: AUSTIN HARGRAVE

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Since Jim Carrey emerged into the mainstream in the early 1990s, Hollywood has changed a lot, and he didn’t like the increasingly corporate approach to filmmaking that felt geared for broad appeal to a wide demographic, as he said in a new THR feature. As a result, he switched his concentration away from acting and onto painting as a method of expression, with a specific lean toward political satire in his work.

Carrey discussed how he’s making a return on his own terms today. He said, “I’m not back in the same way,” he continued. “I don’t feel I’m little Jim trying to hang on to a place in the stratosphere anymore—I don’t feel like I’m trying to hold on to anything.”

“My plan was not to join Hollywood, it was to destroy it. Like, take a gigantic sledgehammer to the leading man and to all the serious­ness,” he said.

Instead, Carrey became a big star and a household name. The 56-year-old claims he didn’t enjoy all the fame. “There’s a weightlessness to it,” he said. “You can dream about it all you want, but until you get it, you don’t realize that it’s really not a place that’s very comfortable for very long.”

He’s spent a lot of time recently doing political cartoons criticizing Donald Trump’s government, from the Space Force to the president’s alleged romance with Stormy Daniels.

At the Television Critics Association summer press tour earlier this month, Carrey told reporters that Trump “probably loves them, on some level.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Carrey discussed his part as children’s TV presenter Mr Pickles in the film ‘Kidding,’ saying:

“I relate to this character on the level of somebody who has tried to bring joy and goodness through my work to the world, whose intention has always been to free people from concern.

Carrey was just confirmed as the actor who would play Dr. Ivo Robotnik in the forthcoming Sonic The Hedgehog adaptation, indicating that he still has some blockbuster potential. However, his general career history appears to indicate that he has drifted away from the more involved tentpole work of his younger years.