Jim Carrey was recently asked by ComicBook.com if there was one character from his beloved movie career that he’d love the opportunity to play again. His answer? The Grinch, but only if he did it via motion capture. The comedian is not interested in being in the makeup chair for hours undergoing an “excruciating” transformation.
“Oh, gosh, you know, if we could figure out the Grinch,” Carrey said. “The thing about it is, on the day, I do that with a ton of makeup and can hardly breathe. It was an extremely excruciating process. The children were in my mind all the time. ‘It’s for the kids. It’s for the kids. It’s for the kids.’ And now, with motion capture and things like that, I could be free to do other things. Anything is possible in this world.”
Carrey played the title character in Ron Howard’s 2000 Christmas epic “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which was based on Dr. Seuss’s 1957 children’s book of the same name. The film earned mix reviews, but it was a box office blockbuster with $346 million worldwide. Carrey’s “Grinch” was the highest-grossing film of 2000 domestically and the sixth-highest grossing film of 2000 globally.
While the movie picked up three Oscar nominations and won for makeup and hairstyling, transforming Carrey into the Grinch was not pleasant. It was “excruciating” for the actor and also a headache for special effects makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji, who once revealed that he checked into therapy after working with Carrey on his Grinch transformation because the actor was so difficult in the makeup chair.
“In the makeup trailer he just suddenly stands up and looks in the mirror, and pointing on his chin, he goes, ‘This color is different from what you did yesterday,’” Tsuji once told Vulture. “I was using the same color I used yesterday. He says, ‘Fix it.’ And okay, you know, I ‘fixed’ it. Every day was like that.”
Tsuji said that he became so exhausted by Carrey that the film’s head makeup artist Rick Baker allowed him to take a hiatus from the project. Tsuji eventually received a call from Carrey weeks into his break asking him to return. Tsuji added that Carrey “kept his temper in check” for the remainder of filming, although his final thought at the end of production was “if I had a choice, I would not be in this mental state all the time.”
