Ewan McGregor To Play Jim Carrey’s Brokeback Prison Buddy

After the success (well, I use that term loosely) of “Brokeback Mountain” you knew it was only a matter to time before other male Hollywood stars started looking for their own brokeback buddy scripts. I was expecting it but I didn’t expect the first out of the gate to be Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor.

Variety is reporting that Ewan McGregor will play the romantic lead opposite Jim Carrey in “I Love You Phillip Morris,” a dark comedy that marks the directing debut of “Bad Santa” scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa.

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

I guess Carrey decided he hasn’t done enough high profile (or low profile for that matter) gay roles lately so he signed up a while back to play Steven Russell, a married father whose conman ways introduced him to the Texas prison system. There, he fell in love with cellmate Phillip Morris.

This story is supposed to be based on actual events. I’m having a hard time, however, getting past the fact that one of the characters is named after a cigarette company. Maybe Russell just liked his smokes?

Anyway, McGregor, always an actor on the edge of gayness, decided to take the role of Phillip Morris. As the story goes, Russell’s love for Morris motivated his escape from prison four times, once by using a green pen and bucket of water to change his prison outfit into what appeared to be surgical scrubs, another time by faking his death from AIDS and signing his own death certificate (what kinds of jails are we running down here in Texas?). Morris eventually got out, but Russell’s escapades got him a 144-year sentence.

The moral: Gay prison love can only lead to more pain.

The fact that the writers of “Bad Santa” also wrote this make me wonder where they might take the dangling participles of this script (pun definitely intended). I mean, how do you fake your own death of AIDS and then sign yourself out? How does that even work on anything other than Family Guy? And does Ewan play hard to get? Does he just string Carrey along by flirting with him, maybe sharing his lunch, letting him wear his prison jump suit, borrow his toothbrush…or is Carrey more of a stalker? Guess we’ll have to wait and see which way this one goes.

Production is expected to begin in the spring.