Lengthy earlier than Jim Carrey turned one of many highest-paid actors in Hollywood historical past, he was filth poor.
Carrey grew up in Ontario because the son of a manufacturing unit employee and janitor. When his father misplaced his job, the household’s monetary state of affairs collapsed. At one level, they had been homeless. As a young person, Jim and his siblings labored nights alongside their mother and father as janitors and safety guards, cleansing workplaces after hours simply to maintain the household afloat. By his personal account, the expertise left him painfully conscious of how fragile monetary safety might be, and the way shortly it might disappear.
That worry stayed with him whilst he chased comedy.
In 1985, an especially broke and deeply depressed Jim Carrey drove his beat-up Toyota Camry into the Hollywood Hills. Parked above Los Angeles, staring down at a metropolis that had but to present him a break, he pulled out his checkbook and wrote himself a test for $10 million, made out to himself “for performing providers rendered.” He postdated it ten years into the long run and stored it folded in his pockets as a non-public promise.
Unbelievably, that prediction/dream got here true.
When Carrey’s father died in 1994, Jim slipped the test into his father’s casket. Throughout the ten-year window he had imagined on that hillside, Jim Carrey had not solely turn into a film star, however he had turn into essentially the most priceless comedic actor in Hollywood.
His monetary ascent was as sudden because it was unprecedented. Carrey earned simply $350,000 for the primary “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” in 1994. The film turned a shock smash and immediately turned him right into a field workplace draw. By the tip of that very same yr, his charge had exploded. He earned $540,000 for “The Masks,” which grossed greater than $350 million worldwide, and an astonishing $7 million for “Dumb & Dumber.” The rise was capped by a $15 million paycheck for the 1995 sequel “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.”
In 1996, Jim Carrey turned the primary actor in historical past to command a $20 million upfront base wage for a single movie. The film was “The Cable Man,” and the deal consumed almost half of the movie’s whole manufacturing price range. Adjusted for inflation, that $20 million paycheck is the equal of greater than $34 million at the moment. Carrey would go on to earn $20 million for “Liar Liar” and “Me, Myself & Irene.” Round this time, Jim was paid $20 million to star in Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
Earlier than his Grinch payday, Jim had already earned round $80 million in his profession. That is the identical as round $155 million at the moment. Greater than sufficient, even after taxes, to make sure Jim would by no means be homeless once more. So he might be a diva together with his initiatives, vitality, and emotion. However this is the factor – monetary trauma lives deep in an individual’s bones and DNA, particularly if that trauma happens early in life. Somebody who grew up cleansing workplaces and was homeless as a young person doesn’t casually stroll away from an infinite payday. And but, inside a single day of filming “The Grinch,” Jim Carrey was so depressing, he supplied to present his whole wage again.
(Photograph by Common/Getty Pictures)
Vulture.com simply revealed an oral historical past of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to mark the movie’s twenty fifth anniversary. As Jim and Ron and numerous different members recount, the difficulty started instantly.
Taking part in the Grinch was not only a matter of carrying make-up. It was a full bodily transformation that bordered on endurance coaching. Early in manufacturing, Carrey spent so long as eight hours a day within the make-up chair whereas a group of artists fitted him right into a dense prosthetic masks and a full-body go well with coated in coarse yak hair. The design required the tip of Carrey’s nostril to be repositioned contained in the masks, successfully sealing his nostrils and forcing him to mouth-breathe all through the shoot.
The remainder of the costume solely compounded the distress. Carrey wore outsized prosthetic tooth that made talking troublesome, ten-inch-long finger extensions that prevented him from scratching an itch or touching his face, and full contact lenses that coated his whole eyeball, leaving him with tunnel imaginative and prescient. The yak hair go well with was relentlessly itchy. The lenses had been painful. The masks was claustrophobic.
Inside days, the discomfort escalated into panic.
Director Ron Howard later recalled seeing Carrey mendacity flat on the ground between takes, respiration right into a brown paper bag as he struggled to regulate nervousness assaults. The bodily restrictions of the costume triggered a way of confinement that Carrey discovered overwhelming. After simply at some point of filming beneath these circumstances, he reached a breaking level.
Carrey instructed the filmmakers he was able to give up. Extra astonishingly, he supplied to return his whole $20 million wage. In accordance with Howard, the supply was not a negotiating tactic. Carrey meant it. The position had turn into insufferable, and no sum of money appeared well worth the every day torment.
For the manufacturing, this was an existential disaster. “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” was constructed solely round Carrey’s efficiency. Recasting was unthinkable. Shutting down would have meant tens of tens of millions in losses and an unfinished tentpole film tied to one of the vital priceless vacation properties in leisure.
The answer they arrived at was extraordinary. Reasonably than redesigning the costume or drastically altering the manufacturing schedule, the filmmakers introduced in an outdoor specialist whose background had nothing to do with performing or filmmaking. His experience was educating navy and intelligence personnel learn how to endure excessive stress, confinement, and torture.
His job was easy: preserve Jim Carrey from quitting.
Carrey later defined that the specialist taught him a sequence of coping methods designed to interrupt panic spirals. When the nervousness set in, he was instructed to shock his nervous system with bodily ache, comparable to punching his personal leg or a trusted pal’s arm. He was inspired to vary sensory patterns within the room, turning off a tv and switching on the radio, or consuming giant quantities of meals to redirect his focus.
With these methods in place, and after additional refinements to the prosthetics, the every day make-up course of was ultimately lowered from eight hours to roughly three. Carrey stayed. The manufacturing stabilized. The film moved ahead.
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” turned the highest-grossing home movie of 2000 and a perennial vacation staple that continues to generate huge income via reruns, merchandise, and licensing greater than twenty years later.
