An interview Jim Carrey recently gave at a red carpet event for New York Fashion Week grabbed the attention of the media earlier this week.
Asked how he felt about the event he was attending, Carrey talked about the ‘meaninglessness’ of the ceremony and the ‘icons’ it was celebrating.
The actor is currently at the Toronto Film Festival promoting his film Jim & Andy, and was asked by The Wrap to explain his comments. What followed was a similarly existential explanation to his previous interview.
When asked about his character in the new film, Carrey said: “As an actor you play characters, and if you go deep enough into those characters, you realize your own character is pretty thin to begin with. You suddenly have this separation and go, 'Who’s Jim Carrey? Oh, he doesn’t exist actually.'
“There’s just a relative manifestation of consciousness appearing, and someone gave him a name, a religion, a nationality, and he clustered those together into something that’s supposed to be a personality, and it doesn’t actually exist. None of that stuff, if you drill down, is real.”
On having a supposed ‘existential crisis’, he answered: “It wasn’t so much a crisis as having an existential experiment, but that’s been my life. I believe I got famous so I could let go of fame, and it’s still happening, but not with me.
“I’m not a part of it anymore. Dressing happens, doing hair happens, interviewing happens, but it happens without me, without the idea of a ‘me.’ You know what I’m saying? It’s a weird little semantic jump, and it’s not that far, but it’s a universe apart from where most people are.”
