It seems that the most ground-breaking comedy is born from misery and suffering that would be unbearable to most people, but not to Jim Carrey. He has learned how to make people laugh at a very young age, yet most of his free time he spent in front of a mirror, making faces at himself. The lonely childhood might have honed his comic skills, but has done nothing to make him a happier human being. Not to mention other mishaps that were following him during each and every step of his life!
As a kid Jim Carrey has cried his heart out fearing his parents would die. He locked himself in the bathroom and had a real breakdown. His parents were banging on the door trying to talk to him, yet all he could think about was losing them. Jim Carrey’s mother, seeking love and attention, liked to talk about how unwell she was and how she could die any minute, adding to the anxiety that was eating up young Jim Carrey.
All this led to Jim Carrey writing a book How Roland Rolls which tackles some of the most important issues no one likes to talk about with kids – life, death, and what happens afterwards. Having suffered himself, Jim Carrey wanted to help all those other kids who didn’t have anyone to talk to about their fears.
At one point in time Carrey’s family got so poor that he could no longer go to school and had to drop out in order to help his family. Together they got a job for the whole family and, according to Jim Carrey, it actually wasn’t so bad as he got to be with his loved ones and had lots of free time to hone his comedic skills. He was working on his comedy act and it paid off!
Jim Carrey was really bad at socializing or rather he didn’t know he had to go out and communicate with people. He spent lots of time in his room in front of the mirror, making funny faces, which was a great help in his later career as a comic. Yet Jim Carrey admits that he was quite sociable at school, but after he dropped out his character made a 180-degree turn and he didn’t want to make any friends at all.
During those harsh times he and his family got homeless and had to live in a van. Now Jim Carrey remember it all with a certain fondness, joking that it was like living in a camp, which was a normal thing to do for Canadians.
Jim Carrey describes himself as a serious person, confessing that not many people get to see this side of him. In an interview with Larry King from CNN he told about his long-life fight with depression, which is still going on. He managed to turn his life around by quitting smoking, alcohol, and ditching Prozac, yet it’s not over yet. He’s come to a place where he ‘sometimes feels happy’ and that is probably as good as things will get.
After breaking up with Jenny McCarthy, who has been his partner for five years, Jim Carrey felt so heartbroken that the only thing that actually saved him was art. It became his therapy to mend the broken heart and at some point he became so obsessed with it that the whole house was packed full of paintings.
Jim Carrey got so carried away with the role of Andy Kaufman in the movie Man on the Moon that he completely lost track of his own personality. The technique is called ‘method acting’, but the comic admitted that he took it too far, completely losing his own identity. It took him months to get back into shape, returning to his own style of performance, posing questions like ‘Who is Jim Carrey? What does he believe in?’
Jim Carrey has had a successful career as a comic with movies Dumb & Dumber, Ace Ventura, Liar Liar, The Mask, but he has never felt content with his achievements. The star confessed that even getting on ‘top of the food chain’ didn’t make him feel happy, which made him re-evaluate his whole life and career, question the very reason for him being here, living his life. He says that some of the realizations brought him peace and now he feels freer than ever, yet there is still a darker side to the comic actor we all know and love so much.