NEWS
Jim Carrey Opens up About Life in Parade
01 Feb 2020 By Eva Araújo (Web correspondent)
With so many things going on with Jim Carrey's career, no wonder we have been reading and seeing a lot of interviews these days. And we love it!
Recently an interview in the magazine Parade has become available. You should check it out, here are some parts of it:
What was your childhood like?
I moved around a lot. My dad [Percy] was looking for jobs and stuff. He was an accountant, but he really was a comedian, and a saxophone and clarinet player, par excellence. The funniest man I've ever met. Truly off-the-hook, insanely funny. If you look at the little thumbnail on my Twitter, there's a man with his hands up, with his knee up in the air, and he's doing some kind of crazy, goofy dance. That's my father at his wedding. That's it, in a nutshell. My dad had a desire to turn the world on-to walk into a room and make everybody feel like everything is just great. People just left our home all the time literally with pee spots, just going, "Oh my God, Percy, you missed your calling." And I became his calling, you know? We were like a tag team of comedy. We were amazing.
Is there anything in your personality that came from your mother, Kathleen?
The art. My mom painted and did pastel pictures. She would get up in the middle of the night when the brats weren't awake, and would do these wonderful paintings for our room. And she had a tremendous talent for it. When I finally started really becoming a painter and a sculptor, I suddenly realized one day, "Oh my gosh-for 40 years I've been a custodian of the talent my father gave me, and now I'm getting time with my mother." And she suffered a lot too, so there was a lot of me helping her in her pain. It motivated me to be funny, to make her laugh, to feel better. I always say, "I challenge any comedian to say they didn't have a mother who was in pain."
You've played bad guys before. What's fun about being bad?
Well, there ain't no yin without a yang! I love to play the yin or the yang. If you're telling a story that ends up being something that entertains people and uplifts them, just, I don't know, makes them feel a little bit more buoyant than they did when they came in? Then I'll play the bad guy for that. That's why it is good to play the villain, and it is good to play the good guy, because they're all in me, you know? They're as close as a choice. And I never get away with the bad choices; I always pay for them in spades. My karma is instant-like, Sonic-fast.
Do you still make bad choices?
Yeah, I make bad choices. For me, art is trying to take a mixture of pain and intelligence and create something that wasn't there before. There's something beautiful about taking a painful thing and making a painting out of it. I have some horrific paintings I've done, and some characters that I've done that I wasn't happy being in, but they were a part of me at the time and I needed to express it in a way that isn't, you know, pulling my pants down in the middle of an intersection. Not that I'm above that.
Now that Kidding is headed into season two, what do you enjoy about being on TV again and playing Jeff Piccirillo and Mr. Pickles?
To be able to explore the character-and not in just a brief way, but to live with it for a while and have it play out over time-is pretty great. Jeff and Mr. Pickles are the part of me that, no matter what is happening in life, has to find the lesson in it. Jeff and Mr. Pickles turn it into something valuable.
What do you do to stay healthy, both physically and emotionally?
I don't stay healthy. I go off completely sometimes and indulge in things that I know aren't good for me: Sometimes it's food, and sometimes it's people, and sometimes it's dating, and sometimes it's-you know, a lot of different things can serve to help you escape from the world. So I always come back to the same place, where I go, "OK, it's time for the purification; it's time to get all of the noise out." Now I'm a teetotaler.
Why is your new book, Memoirs and Misinformation, a novel and not a memoir?
"It's a different animal completely than anybody's ever seen, and I swear-I promise you-it's never been done. It's a fiction in which you will get to know me better than you could ever know me. I was naked as I've ever been in anything in this book. There's a lot of truth in this book, and it's sci-fi, and it's drama, and it's the absurdist comedy that you can think of-you know, like [Joseph] Heller or [Kurt] Vonnegut or the people that I loved growing up. It's very much what I want to leave with people and how I want them to know me, you know? 'Cause there's no better way to know me than to crawl into my right brain and spend some time there.
What's a typical day like in Hawaii?
I do everything. I ride my bike, I go to the beach, I get up at 5 in the morning and I run down to the ocean and jump naked into the ocean before everybody gets up. I'm a streaker, you know, and I love it! I think everybody should be naked, in some way, somewhere in nature. It's a very, very good feeling.
What's your favorite thing to do with your daughter, Jane, and your grandson, Jackson?
We've been playing Sonic [the video game], and I'm so bad at it, it's frustrating! But we have a lot of fun, and he just trash-talks me. He's 9 years old and he humiliates me. I told him I was gonna practice and I was gonna kick his butt, and he said, "Yeah, if you go back and get born again and start playing at the age of 2." And I'm like, "Who are you?" [Laughs] But, hey, I'm inside the game, that's good enough for me.
How would you like to be remembered?
I don't care if people remember my name. I want what I do to mean something now. I care that the people I came in contact with maybe were a little bit freer or a little bit better or a little bit happier, and they did something for somebody, and it spiraled. We can each, in our lives, affect so many people. So that's all I'm after. It's a good life. A really good life.
We got to know a little bit about Jim but we got to know we'll know a lot more by reading his book! We can't wait.
We at JCO will keep you updated as more news come.
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