Did the Virgin Mary miraculously gift Jim Carrey a Mustang bike?
It’s always been tricky to pin down Jim Carrey. He’s performed in some of the most admired comedy films of all time, including Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar and Me Myself and Irene. However, Carrey has occasionally contrasted his typically goofy performance with more serious dramatic roles, and nowhere was this more evident than in Charlie Kaufman and Michael Gondry’s 2004 romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The film told of Carrey’s character, Joel Barrish, discovering that his former girlfriend has had all of her memories of him erased, leading Joel to reluctantly go down the same path. Naturally, the film featured scenes in which Carrey’s character revisits some of his most fond memories of his girlfriend, Clementine, played effortlessly by Kate Winslet.
Carrey was asked during an interview if, like in the film, he would want to revisit a particular memory from his past. The comedic actor responded: “What was interesting during the movie was that these psychic things were happening. Of course, I was pouring a lot of what I’ve gone through into it as much as I could.”
Carrey then gave a specific example of a time he was in the second grade, and something miraculous occurred. “I had a teacher who came into school, and she was an Irish lady who said, if I pray to the Virgin Mary and ask for anything I want, she gives me anything I want,” Carrey said. “I’m sitting in the back of the class going, ‘Hmm…'”
Carrey continued: “So, I went home, and I prayed to the Virgin Mary for a bicycle – for a green, Mustang bike”. Remarkably, just two weeks later, Carrey won a green Mustang bike. “I won a green Mustang bike in a raffle I didn’t enter two weeks later,” he said. Somehow, seemingly out of nowhere, Carrey won the bike he had wanted so badly.
He elaborated on the strange occurrence: “A friend of mine put my name into a sporting goods store, and I won the bike”. The crazy event also worked its way into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “That bike showed up in the movie without me even [mentioning it], in the scene where the rain starts, and I start trying to bring her back to when I grew up in the memories,” Carrey added.
The whole happening was of profound importance to Carrey, and he remembers it fondly. “The Mustang bike, when it showed up that day, I was so excited because this is how my life is,” he noted. “It’s like, ‘Wow! Okay, so I’m going back into my past and here’s the magical Mustang bike!’ The whole thing was the exact bike I had, and I didn’t do it.”
