Jim Carrey's Identity and Performance

Watch this.

I don't exist. So, uh, they're all

characters that I played, including Jim Carrey,

including Joel Barish, including any of those things.

They're all characters. Jim Carrey was a less, uh, intentional character.

Right.

Because I thought I was just building something

that people would like,

but it was a character. I played the guy that

was free from concern so that

people who watched me would be free from concern.

If Jim Carrey spent years slipping messages into his interviews,

it's because he

knew exactly what could happen to him, and he wasn't wrong.

He's one of the few who said all of this out in the open, on camera, with a smile,

like hiding the truth inside a joke was the only way to say it without

disappearing. Seeing that, you start to understand what gets really

strange.

In the clip you just watched, he literally says he doesn't exist,

that Jim Carrey

is a character, that he built it so people would look the

other way.

He was playing someone free from all worry, so you could feel that way too.

That's not a philosophical reflection, that's a mission statement.

And for years, he did the same thing off-camera.

Bizarre appearances, interviews where he talked about control,

erased

identity, people pulling the strings, always with that smile, always just

vague enough that nobody took it seriously.

Today, when we see Jim Carrey, we wonder if he's still the same person.

Yet the connection between what he was trying to say back then and who he

is now

explains a lot. The real question isn't why he stopped

talking.

It's what happened between the moment he was speaking and the moment he vanished.