Sonic 3’s incredible laser dance sequence was, of course, Jim Carrey’s idea

One of the standout moments of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 sees Jim Carrey pulling double duty as two Doctors Robotnik – Ivo and his grandfather Gerald – merrily work their way through a classic Hollywood trope: the laser security grid. That series was not only technically challenging to perform, Sonic3 director Jeff Fowler tells Polygon that it was a scene suggested by Carrey himself – which certainly sounds like something Jim Carrey would do.

“In our early conversations, it was one of Jim’s requests,” Fowler recalls. “In the first (Sonic the hedgehog movie), there is a moment where Robotnik is in his laboratory and thinks he is alone. He puts on some music (‘Where Evil Grows’ by the Poppy family) and he just starts dancing. He’s having a little dance party, and then he’s interrupted by (his assistant) Stone. And so Jim wanted to dance again. Of course we didn’t just have to let him dance, we had to go big and really go for it.”

“We immediately brought in these amazing choreographers and this dance team,” Fowler said. “Of course Jim wanted to do everything he could, but there was no way he could do everything, especially since he dances with himself. So there will always have to be another human in the room who dances with him and who would become a face replacement over time.

Fowler said it was a challenge to make the double Robotnik dance scene work, based on the dozens of lasers bouncing off their laser-resistant bodies. “We quickly found that the more we threw in, the harder it became to understand their movements,” Fowler said. “So it was a lot of trial and error, figuring out exactly what the right amount of lasers is to create these really fun silhouettes and geometric patterns with the way the lasers bounced off their bodies.”