The movie role that broke Jim Carrey: “It was so difficult”
When someone says a role “broke” them, you’d expect it to be an incredibly difficult one. You’d imagine it to be a heavy, emotionally taxing job that requires an extreme amount of emotional labour. But for Jim Carrey, the most challenging project seems to have been the most light-hearted.
Carrey’s career has always been strange. Breaking out as the new favourite kid on the stand-up scene, he secured his start down the usually funny guy alley of stand-up and sketch comedy. His ability to make impressions, fully manipulating his voice and movements, quickly gained attention as he did a string of TV appearances.
As he moved into film, Carrey stayed in the comedy sphere for a while, proving his leading-man capabilities in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. All released in 1994, by the middle of the decade, Carrey was one of the most sought-after names in the industry, quickly shooting from a rising face to a full-on star.
But what makes Carrey so unique is his refusal to stay in one lane. He could have very easily stuck to comedy, making a career out of being the silly lead in lighthearted, fun-for-the-family movies. Even if he’d just done that, he likely would have had an excellent and enduring career, given that his comedic roles have gone down as some of the finest in the history of the genre. But Carrey clearly always wanted more from his experiences on the silver screen. Instead of sticking to one laughter-shaped box, he broke out into more dramatic roles. In The Truman Show and Man On The Moon, Carrey showed he could do serious just as well as silly.
Man On The Moon was an especially important moment in Carrey’s career as his depiction of Andy Kaufman was a landmark moment in his personal life. In many ways, this film absolutely haunted the actor, feeling like he was never truly able to shake the ghost of the comedian. He thought he lost himself inside the role, for better or for worse. “It was definitely an important moment in the process where I found myself subjugating Jim Carrey for Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton. And then at the end of it, looking for Jim Carrey again and having trouble finding him,” Carrey explained. “And at a certain point, I realised, ‘Hey, wait a second. If it’s so easy to lose Jim Carrey, who the hell is Jim Carrey?’”
But how do you go back to being the funny man after an experience like that? With great difficulty, Carrey would find. In 2000, the year after making the movie, the actor stepped into one of his most beloved family-friendly characters but found it to be one of the hardest moments in his career as he played the Grinch.
“Oh, The Grinch broke me,” he said. The actor described the challenge of channelling personal difficulties and putting them aside to play this purely comedic, loveably grouchy role: “I was a wild pony before that happened, but I would cry before I went to the makeup trailer. It was so difficult.”
The intense makeup needed for the film didn’t help, as he told Graham Norton that it felt like “being buried alive every day.” The physical and emotional toll was so much that the actor tried to quit the now iconic movie, stating, “I went back to my trailer and put my leg through the wall, and I told [director] Ron Howard I couldn’t do the movie.”
In the end, the lighthearted Christmas movie turned out to be such an intense experience Carrey even trained with the CIA to get through it. “[He decided to] hire a gentleman who was trained to teach CIA operatives how to endure torture,” he said of how Ron Howard convinced him to stay, “And so that’s how I got through The Grinch! It was quite hilarious.”
Watch a preview of the film below.
