The role Jim Carrey hated playing but isn’t against playing again: “Anything is possible”
With his elastic face and a myriad of fun voices, Jim Carrey has turned his many talents into a number of iconic characters across his career. On the sillier side of things, he is responsible for such cinematic oddities as Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber, Dr Robotnik in the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ series, and the titular lunatic from The Mask. As a serious actor, Carrey has brought us to our knees with Joel Barish in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the unknowing main character of The Truman Show.
One Carrey character that film fans love to reacquaint themselves with every year is The Grinch. The holiday-hating Green menace from 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas is made so much more entertaining by Carrey’s unhinged portrayal. He turned a creepy Dr Suess villain into a bonafide comedy legend, throwing every ounce of himself into making the part as memorable as possible. This feat is made all the more impressive by the well-known fact that the Canadian hated every single minute of making the movie.
“The thing about it is, on the day, I do that with a ton of makeup and can hardly breathe,” Carrey told Comic Book about his time on set. “It was an extremely excruciating process.” Application of the extensive Grinch makeup, which was created by seven-time Oscar winner Rick Baker, took two-and-a-half hours every day. Carrey has compared the process to being ‘buried alive’ and became extremely irritable as a result. He would often disappear for long periods, holding up production for significant periods of time. Director Ron Howard once got in the suit himself in a show of solidarity and invited actor Don Knotts to the set because he knew Carrey was a big fan.
You’d think that the star would want nothing to do with this hairy nightmare ever again, but that isn’t the case. In that same interview, Carrey revealed that he would love to make a return to Whoville, provided they could ‘figure out’ how to make the character work. “With motion capture and things like that, I could be free to do other things,” he said. “Anything is possible in this world.”
When pressed for more information, nice guy Jim had one answer and one answer only. “The children were in my mind all the time,” he said. “‘It’s for the kids. It’s for the kids. It’s for the kids.’” Prior to The Grinch, Carrey hadn’t really done a movie for children. There was a lot riding on this one. A 1966 TV special based on the book, in which Boris Karloff voiced the character, was already a holiday classic. There was a lot of pressure on the funnyman to live up to those expectations, and it’s safe to say he surpassed them.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas was the most successful movie at the US box office in the year 2000. It was the sixth-highest-grossing film in the entire world that year and became the second-highest-grossing Christmas film of all time behind Home Alone. Was that worth enduring months of torture? The jury’s still out.
The appetite for the Grinch story is still high if the success of the 2018 animated version is anything to go by. Maybe Carrey can be coaxed out of retirement to give the beloved monster another try. Or maybe the sight of that green hair will finally put him off acting once and for all.
