Jim Carrey has admitted that he once thought he had ten minutes to live, and that in that moment he even paused to take a photo of the reason why!
Carrey first rose to fame in gross-out comedy movies such as Dumb & Dumber and Ace Ventura, where his seemingly elastic face and never-ending supply of energy gained much fan acclaim.
Since then, Carrey has starred in films across a wide range of genres, including a range of excellent romcoms like Bruce Almighty.
But, Carrey doesn’t shy away from more dramatic roles, either. He gained a lot of critical praise for his role in dystopian reality television satire, The Truman Show. He also played the romantic straight-man lead in artsy classic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Alongside his acting success, Carrey has had to deal with a certain level of fame. Particularly in the ’90s, Carrey was one of the most recognizable faces in the celebrity world, and his hugely successful film roles led to a legion of loyal fans.
At first, Carrey seemed to court the public’s attention, but in recent years, he’s become a lot more private and less keen on holding his spot in the public eye. In fact, he’s often quite critical of society’s obsession with fame.
As many will know, Carrey has been a successful comedian for many years now, but to begin with it wasn’t like that.
During his first time on stage, things went pretty badly as he has previously explained: “I finally got offstage to huge applause just because I mentioned I was going to leave the stage.”
“Then I crawled through the audience on my hands and knees, popped up behind the piano and started banging on the keys, singing, ‘I hate you all, you gave me cancer.’”
“I got in the car and I cried all the way home,” he said. “Because I don’t want to make people unhappy.”
However, Carrey has revealed that he once thought it was all over, when back in 2018 he received an alert to his phone saying :“EMERGENCY MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII
“SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
Naturally, that message would scare anyone into thinking they were just about to die! Thankfully, the alert turned out to be a mistake, with Hawaii Governor David Ige apologising for the message later on.
However, that didn’t stop Carrey from feeling all the fears in that moment.
He spoke about this on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon a few years back, as he explained how it made its way into his book Memoirs and Misinformation.
“The cover is actually my face after being told that I have 10 minutes to live – and that’s for real,” he explained.
“It was a fake missile alert in Hawaii. I was there. I was writing, my assistant Linda called me, she was crying. She said, ‘We have ten minutes left.’
“And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘The missiles are coming.’”
Carrey continued: “It was completely real to us. And my brain started winding and I tried to get off the island with my daughter, I couldn’t get off the island. And then the question was, should we all try to get together? I said, ‘I don’t want to die in my car.’
“And we had to say goodbye.”
Carrey said that he ‘sat on the lanai and looked out at the ocean’, while he started to consider what he could do with this ‘last moment of time’.
He continued: “I just decided to through a list of gratitudes and, honest to God, I just could not stop thinking of wonderful things that have happened to me, and blessings that I’ve had. So it was lovely. And I got to a point of grace, with about 2 minutes to spare when I found out it wasn’t actually happening.
“All I was planning to do was close my eyes and be thankful, because it’s been a good ride.”
