The role Jim Carrey compared to “having knives in your eyes everyday”
A large part of what made Jim Carrey a superstar was his ability to twist his face into expressions that no other human being was capable of making. Still, when he required assistance in that arena, it ended up being one of the most miserable experiences of his career.
Before Mike Myers’ The Cat in the Hat came along and proved to be such an affront to cinema that the widow of Dr Seuss forbid her late husband’s work from ever being adapted into live-action again, it looked as though the author’s back catalogue could be fertile ground for flesh-and-blood filmmaking. After all, Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas was a huge festive hit that hauled in almost $350million at the global box office, won an Academy Award for ‘Best Makeup’, and netted its leading man a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’. However, it was the aforementioned makeup that posed the biggest problem.
In order to embody the title character, Carrey spent hours in the chair every day before he’d even stepped foot on set, which included extensive prosthetics being applied to the star’s face. It caused plenty of frustrations, with the leading man kicking a hole in the wall of his trailer at one stage, which led to government intervention. Well, in a way.
Howard and producer Brian Grazer ended up hiring a consultant who’d trained Navy Seals on how to withstand torture in an effort to alleviate Carrey’s misgivings. This extended to the pain caused by the Grinch’s custom contact lenses and the laborious process of sitting completely still for over two hours prior to shooting across a four-month shoot.
Hardly reflective of a whimsical adventure designed to charm audiences around the world, with Carrey suffering in the name of his performance. “It was like having knives in your eyes every day,” was how he described it to Entertainment Weekly. “It was The Mask times a thousand. I felt like God was teaching me patience.”
Even with his anti-torture training in place, the friction behind the scenes of How the Grinch Stole Christmas wasn’t entirely alleviated. Makeup artist Kazu Hiro recalled how the actor’s hatred of the makeup spilt over on occasion.
“On set, he was really mean to everybody, and at the beginning of the production, they couldn’t finish,” he said. “After two weeks, we could only finish three days’ worth of the shooting schedule because suddenly he would just disappear, and when he came back, everything was ripped apart. We couldn’t shoot anything.”
He got there in the end, but suffice to say, playing the Grinch would mark the last time Carrey fully immersed himself in character to the point where he’d be covered head to toe in makeup and prosthetics to render him completely unrecognisable.
