Why Einhorn From Ace Ventura Pet Detective Looks So Familiar
Given the general yo-yo trajectory of Jim Carrey's now decades-long career in the spotlight, it's all too easy to forget his meteoric rise to Hollywood infamy began with an unabashedly hammy performance in a campy little crime farce named Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Released in 1994 to virtually no fanfare, the film shocked showbiz insiders by grossing over $100 million at the box office, becoming a true classic in the canon of '90s comedy, and making instant movie star of a then-relatively unknown Carrey.
Ace Ventura also found Carrey playing a cocky, but brilliant, "pet detective" hired to track down the Miami Dolphins' mascot, Snowflake, who'd been kidnapped days ahead the team's Super Bowl appearance. Even almost 30 years later, that plot remains every bit a silly as it sounds, but it also makes zero apologies for its brazen lack of refinement or comedic boundaries.
While Ace Ventura proved a full-on star vehicle for Jim Carrey, it also aided the brief resurgence of Sean Young, who, a decade prior, had been a major player in showbiz. Young appeared in Ace Ventura as the film's primary antagonist, Lt. Lois Einhorn, and If you're a fan of Ace Ventura, you no doubt recall Einhorn is the source of the film's biggest twist, and that said twist inspired one of the more infamous reveals in the history of cinema.
Needless to say, Young made quite the lasting impression on an entire generation of movie fans with her appearance in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, even if the younger fans had no idea who she was. If you're one of those fans who still struggles to place her face, here's why Einhorn from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective looks so familiar.
Sean Young played the perfect replicant in Blade Runner
We meant it when we claimed Sean Young had been a major Hollywood player in the '80s. In fact, the actor spent much of the decade sharing the screen with, and stealing scenes from, bona fide Hollywood icons like Kevin Costner (No Way Out), Michael Douglas (Wall Street), Gene Hackman (No Way Out), and Bill Murray (Stripes). One of her highest-profile roles came in 1982, when Ridley Scott cast the fresh-faced Young opposite Harrison Ford in a little sci-fi confection called Blade Runner.
Blade Runner was just Young's third big-screen credit. As the other two parts came via minor roles in James Ivory's Jane Austen in Manhattan and opposite Murray in Stripes, it's safe to say she'd never seen or experienced anything of quite the scope that Scott and Co. were conjuring with Blade Runner. Likewise, she'd certainly never been through a production quite as tumultuous — not that anything could've prepared the young star for the legendary production woes that beset Blade Runner.
Still, if you know anything about Blade Runner's history, you know it's sort of a miracle the film ever got finished, and that it actually turned out pretty well. Though it didn't break any box office records on release, it's become, in the years since, one of the most beloved science-fiction films ever produced. That's in no small part thanks to Scott's wildly stylistic vision, of course, but we also like to think Sean Young's compelling, and utterly heartbreaking, work as the replicant Rachael, which was digitally reprised for Denis Villeneuve's egregiously undervalued 2017 sequel Blade Runner: 2049, helped the film land on a more human level.
Sean Young played queen of the desert in Dune
Blade Runner was hardly Sean Young's last encounter with a famed science-fiction epic, though most would be more apt to label her second big budget sci-fi flick infamous. That film was David Lynch's wildly ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi saga, Dune and, if you know its history, you know the film's ambition eventually crumbled under production issues that made those that plagued Blade Runner look like a cakewalk.
Those issues eventually led to the release of a film that, thanks largely to studio interference, was essentially a shell of the Dune David Lynch had set out to make. That film was released to a critical drubbing the likes of which few major productions had ever seen, with Roger Ebert famously quipping, "This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time."
Ultimately, Dune failed even to recoup its $45 million production budget. Still, in spite of Dune's failures, it's become, for better or worse, a bit of a cult classic over the years, and continues to inspire fevered debate among cineastes the world over.
Whichever side you fall on, there's little argument that Dune is a bit of a mess from its opening frame to its last, even if it is a boldly stylish one. The one thing the film has working for it throughout is the utter devotion Lynch clearly inspired in his cast, which saw Sean Young standing out for her work as Paul Atreides' desert-born paramour, Chani.
Sean Young helped push a young woman over the edge in Darling
After briefly claiming "It Girl" status in Hollywood through much of the '80s, Sean Young's career went a bit sideways in the '90s, with just her impressive comedic turn in Ace Ventura standing out in the mix. Her post-Ace Ventura career track has been every bit as sideways, but she's kept herself more than gainfully employed over the years, amassing over 120 professional credits on her IMDb page. Among those credits, you'll find a pair of 2015 genre gems from two impressive up-and-coming filmmakers.
The first saw Young appear briefly as a wealthy, would-be socialite in S. Craig Zahler's maniacally brooding Western freak show, Bone Tomahawk. In the second, Young played a much more active role in some on-screen brutality, even if her character did so in a fairly indirect fashion. Of Sean Young's screen time in Mickey Keating's marvelous creeper Darling, we can tell you it amounts to little more than a couple of minutes, and that Young uses it to establish an elegantly ominous tone for the madness to follow.
For those who haven't seen Keating's minor horror masterpiece, Darling follows the tragic unraveling of a desperately lonely New York woman (a wonderfully unhinged Lauren Ashely Carter) who agrees to play caretaker to a classic old home in the heart of the city. The building is owned by Sean Young's character, Madame, who imparts a few words of wisdom before informing the woman the previous caretaker had indeed gone mad and thrown herself off the roof. Let's just say matters get dicey after she takes her leave. But if you want to know more about the insanity that unfolds in Keating's Darling, we'd encourage you to discover the film for yourself, because it's one of the most overlooked psychological thrillers produced in the past decade, and made all the better for its inclusion of Sean Young's particular skills.