The cold day in 1997 when a grizzly bear nearly mauled Jim Carrey to death: “What a way to go”
For a man who once committed himself to squeezing out of a fake rhinoceros’ arsehole onscreen, it would almost be fitting for Jim Carrey to depart the mortal plane at the hands of a member of the animal kingdom.
He also made a movie where the majority of his co-stars were penguins, tracked down a stolen dolphin in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and sold a decapitated bird to a blind kid in Dumb and Dumber, so the actor’s history with non-humans is in-depth enough that it wouldn’t have been the strangest way to bow out.
Still, you wouldn’t imagine it would be especially quick and painless to be mauled to death by a grizzly bear, and had the worst come to pass, and the Golden Globe-winning star had been torn to shreds by a hulking predatory beast in the Alaskan wilderness, it would have even been captured for posterity.
Carrey cracked the A-list by doing very weird things with his face and body, but the longer his career wore on, the more apparent it became that he was no slouch when it came to saying weird things with his mouth, either, with the funnyman often coming across as if he believes himself to be some kind of existential guru.
As a result, that odd mindset did come in handy when he was prospectively staring death in the face, with the Mask and Truman Show headliner reliving the moment he went to Alaska in 1997, explaining that as close as he was to shitting his britches, he also found it strangely freeing to be staring down a hungry bear.
“It was 30 years away from me, just circling, out in the open,” Carrey said. “And we had no gun, because the guide believed bears are so smart that they sense aggressive energy. So we were just vocalising, ‘Hi, bear! Hey, bear!’ I’m standing there in front of this grizzly, and he’s chewing grass. I felt completely free.”
Completely free, maybe, but not entirely safe. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, if you go now, what a way to go,'” he added. “I wasn’t Jim Carrey that day. You know what I mean? I was no one important that day.” We do know what he means, because as far as the bear was concerned, he may well have been a snack.
While he makes it sound like a borderline spiritual moment, he was eventually struck by the realisation that, in no time at all, had the bear seen fit, he’d have been turned into a pile of blood and guts. “The guide and my friend were behind me, videotaping me,” he elaborated. “So I was standing there thinking, ‘Ace Ventura mauled by a grizzly’, with footage on every show of me beating on the bear as he plays double Dutch with my entrails.”
Obviously, that didn’t come to pass, but he didn’t seem too disturbed by what could have been the end of him. Place most other people in the same situation, and they might have handled it differently.
