Jim Carrey dropped out of school at fifteen to work nights at a Toronto tire factory so his family could afford their car. He went on stage anyway. By twenty-two he had written himself a check for ten million dollars, postdated for Thanksgiving 1995, and kept it in his wallet. In late 1994 Dumb and Dumber opened and he became a twenty-million-dolla
Biography
Jim Carrey dropped out of school at fifteen to work nights at a Toronto tire factory so his family could afford their car. He went on stage anyway. By twenty-two he had written himself a check for ten million dollars, postdated for Thanksgiving 1995, and kept it in his wallet. In late 1994 Dumb and Dumber opened and he became a twenty-million-dollar-a-picture star. He cashed the check.
In 1994 alone he released Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber — three films, three archetypes, one decade rewritten. His rubber-faced physicality was impossible to categorize. Comedy did not move like that before Jim Carrey, and there is no one to whom it has passed since.
He then detonated his own brand. The Truman Show (1998). Man on the Moon (1999). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Each a dramatic role of uncommon gravity. Critics who had dismissed him as a clown wrote him two Golden Globes. Producers did not know what to do with him. Carrey did not seem to care.
Since 2010 he has largely retreated from film. He paints prolifically — enormous canvases of color and grief following the death of his long-time partner. He wrote a surreal, autobiographical novel, Memoirs and Misinformation, in 2020. He gives commencement addresses about impermanence. He once told a graduating class, "You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love."
The most fascinating thing about Jim Carrey is that the mask came off somewhere around 2014 and nobody knows what is underneath. He does not, either. That, it turns out, is also the art.
