Actor Varney Comfortable as Ernest

Jim Varney walked into the room at the Jefferson Hotel here looking a little more worldly than he does as Ernest, the character he has portrayed in hundreds of commercials and in three movies.

It was probably the hair. As Ernest, Varney’s hair is secondary to his features. As Ernest, he usually wears a hat, one that hides his hair, and when the hair is showing, it is slick with mousse. In person, Varney’s hair is dry, full and just a little bit wind-blown. In person, he is a funny man. Asked what he would like to have for lunch, he said he wouldn’t be eating, that he had already done that.

And what did you have to eat?

“Red meat,” said Varney, sounding like Ernest, “It’s the Amurrican way.”

He’s been playing Ernest for a number of years now. Some people think of Varney and Ernest as the same person. He doesn’t bother to fight that.

“Do something else? Stretch? We’re having a whole lot of fun,” he said. “I guess I don’t want to do Ernest as a steady diet, but then I wouldn’t want to play villains all the time, either.”

He says he hasn’t tired of playing Ernest. “We have a few more ideas for films,” he said.

“We have to have Ernest stay away from alcohol, tobacco and fire arms, anything that is adult and dangerous,” Varney said. “Basically, our audience is very young.”

He admits that Ernest has changed since he was invented. “He had a harder edge in the beginning,” Varney said. “He was more realistic. He’s become more silly as he’s moved along.”

As happens to many movie and television characters, Ernest was part of the Saturday morning line-up for a time. Varney, as Ernest and other characters, was live. “We took a look at the Saturday shows, and it was wall-to-wall cartoon, and in every one, the kids were wondering how they would blow up the robots,” Varney said. “That’s all it was, kids blowing up robots. We wanted something else. We wanted something adults could watch, too.”

Is Varney in danger of becoming one with Ernest? Will their personalities blur? Will one begin to take over the life of the other?

“Not really,” Varney said. “He’s really an 8-year old kid. We talk of him as a separate person.”

He did his very first Ernest commercial for scale. “That was local scale,” he said. “I got $300.”

Today, he lives on a 10-acre farm. “I have a dog and a cat and a wife named Jane,” he said.

Does Ernest have any political views?

“Not really,” Varney said. “He’s Amurrican.”

Varney knows that Ernest gets laughs because he isn’t very bright. He doesn’t know if people transfer this to the actor. “I don’t know,” he said, “but some people do ask me to look at their power tools. I don’t know what they expect, something dumb, but I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t bother me.”