Despite coming out 24 years ago (gulp) and having a very mixed reception, if Rotten Tomatoes is anything to go by, How The Grinch Stole Christmas continues to be a mainstay in many households throughout the festive season and ‘Grinch’ inspired merchandise can even be found in shops like Primark this festive season.
There have recently been rumours that Jim Carrey would be reprising his role as The Grinch but a spokesperson quickly confirmed that there is “no truth” to stories of him returning to play Dr Seuss’s famous character.
Gutted as we are that we won’t get to relive seeing Jim play such an iconic role, a TikTok video revealing trivia about the film likely explains why he’s not intending on revisiting the story.
How playing The Grinch impacted Jim Carrey’s mental health
According to the TikTok account @filmupdatetime, Jim Carrey described his prosthetic makeup for The Grinch as akin to “being buried alive”.
Most days, the makeup would take around 3.5 hours to complete the transformation but on the first day of application, it took almost nine hours to complete.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this process made Jim Carrey want to quit the film entirely but to keep him engaged with the project, producer Brian Grazer hired a CIA expert to train and advise the actor on how to endure torture. Yikes.
One commenter said, “he should have won an Oscar for this role” and with all of this considered, we can only agree.
Jim Carrey later spoke about this experience on The Graham Norton Show. He said he was told to “eat everything you say, if you’re freaking out and you start to spiral downward, turn the television on, change the pattern, have someone you know come and smack you on the head.”
He added that he was also encouraged to “smoke as much as you possibly can” and said that he could be found smoking in full costume with a cigarette holder to prevent the costume going on fire.
This gruelling make-up process was undertaken by Jim Carrey 100 times, according to the actor. Yikes.
He said the thing that really got him through this was, uh, the Bee Gees. We’ll never see the film in the same way again.
