‘The Truman Show’ scene that almost killed Jim Carrey: “I had no breath left”
As Jim Carrey sank like a stone to the bottom of the murky depths, gasping for breath, his world going black, he must have wondered if this was how he would meet his maker.
Back in the late 1990s, on what turned out to be a properly grim day, Carrey didn’t end up in trouble splashing about at the beach or gulping down water at the local pool by mistake. No, he was smack in the middle of a Hollywood set, stuck in a massive tank surrounded by divers and crew – and somehow, even with all that backup, he nearly drowned.
The Ace Ventura icon was shooting The Truman Show, his hugely prescient reality TV satire, under the auspices of director Peter Weir. The ending called for an enormous set piece in which Carrey’s Truman tries to escape his manufactured reality by navigating his sailboat through a storm caused by Ed Harris’ creator Christof, during which he falls overboard. Christof then has to make a decision about whether to shut off the storm or risk the world watching Truman, the star of the most elaborate reality show in the world, die in front of a live audience.
It’s an intense, heart-in-mouth scene in the film, and when it came time to shoot it, Weir was adamant “it had to look real”.
Before Carrey set foot in the deep, cavernous tank on the Universal backlot, extensive safety precautions were run through for the entire cast and crew, which included divers being positioned underwater in case Carrey got into trouble and needed rescuing, or a quick hit from an oxygen tank. Unfortunately, though, according to Carrey, the enormous wave machines used to simulate the storm were much stronger than anyone had anticipated, and this led to a moment everyone involved would love to forget.
“I was wearing wool clothing—a big wool sweater, wool pants, and shoes—and they had jet engines blowing on me, and they had these giant wave machines that were creating gale-force waves,” Carrey told Vanity Fair in 2018.
To his horror, tied with the weight of wet wool, he felt himself losing control and succumbing to the force of the waves. He raised his clenched fist, taught to signal in case of trouble, or if he was starting to panic, but when the divers didn’t respond, he theorised that they hadn’t seen it as a real call for help.
Instead, he claimed, “They just saw it as acting.”
In the next few moments, Carrey, arguably Hollywood’s biggest star at that point, began to sink into the abyss. “I went under, I had no breath left, and I was drowning,” he claimed with complete sincerity. “I was under the water at the bottom of the pool.”
Right before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, with his “last breath” and “last hint of consciousness”, the almost doomed man was able to will his arms to make “a couple of gigantic strokes”, which carried him away from the raging waves of the simulated storm.
He soon surfaced at the edge of the tank where the blue sky had been painted, the edge of Truman’s world, and hung onto that wall, sucking in as much air as his aching lungs would allow, waiting for the storm to abate. About a minute later, it slowly shut down, and this is when Carrey realised the divers, the crew, and Weir had all lost track of where he’d drifted in the chaos. When they finally saw him, everyone rushed over in a fright.
“I almost died,” Carrey grimly revealed. “That was the real deal.”
According to Weir, Carrey wasn’t exaggerating: he truly did come scarily close to shuffling off this mortal coil. “The incident in the tank at Universal that Jim refers to happened the way he said,” the Master & Commander director admitted, adding firmly, “Needless to say, we made changes to our safety procedures.”
Stunningly, despite being angry and frightened by the near miss, the actor filmed more takes in the tank, and never held it against Weir, who dubbed the situation “sobering, to say the least”.
