How Jim Carrey found solace in an impending apocalypse: “It was lovely”
For an actor who became one of the most popular and highest-paid stars in Hollywood by splitting audiences at the side with his rubber-faced antics and slapstick stylings, the life of Jim Carrey hasn’t been without its hardships.
The actor spent periods of his childhood homeless and living in a van with his family, and worked as a janitor in his early teenage years to help make ends meet. Even when he began his stand-up career, he was rejected three times from Saturday Night Live, but that repeated adversity came in very handy.
In the 1990s, Carrey exploded from a relative unknown into an international phenomenon and A-list megastar, taking Hollywood by storm. His onscreen persona might be that of a freewheeling funnyman, but away from the cameras, he’s become known as a complex, complicated, and conflicted man.
Carrey, a longtime practitioner of transcendental meditation, has been on some interesting spiritual journeys. At one point, he even helped instigate a conspiracy theory, one that claimed he was openly pointing towards the Illuminati wielding a significant influence over not only the entertainment industry but also geopolitics.
In short, there are many layers to Carrey, but he revealed himself to be surprisingly calm and collected when he thought his world was literally about to end. In January 2018, the star was at his home in Hawaii when an emergency alert informed all citizens to seek shelter immediately due to an incoming ballistic missile.
Naturally, citizens were plunged into a panic, but Carrey took a remarkably level-headed approach. “I was there, I was writing,” he told Jimmy Kimmel. “My assistant Linda called me. She was crying. She said, ‘We have ten minutes left’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘The missiles are coming from North Korea’. It was completely real to us.”
Carrey was with his daughter at the time, and completely convinced that everything around him was facing imminent obliteration, the pair prepared for the end. “We had to say goodbye,” he admitted. “I sat on the lanai and looked out at the ocean, and at that point, I started going, ‘OK, what can I do with this last moment of time?”
Thinking he had minutes left on the mortal plane, Carrey “just decided to go through a list of gratitudes” that he had, and he “could not stop thinking of wonderful things that have happened to me and blessings that I’ve had.” Most people would be completely entitled to lose their shit, but not him. “It was lovely,” he reflected. “And I got to a point of grace.”
Carrey even used the moment he was informed he had ten minutes left to live as the cover image for his 2020 book, Memoirs and Misinformation, with the actor taking a much more level-headed approach to the prospect of annihilation than most in his position.
