Jim Carrey Was So Miserable In “The Grinch” Makeup He Offered To Give Back His $20 Million Salary After One Day Of Filming

Long before Jim Carrey became one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood history, he was dirt poor.

Carrey grew up in Ontario as the son of a factory worker and janitor. When his father lost his job, the family’s financial situation collapsed. At one point, they were homeless. As a teenager, Jim and his siblings worked nights alongside their parents as janitors and security guards, cleaning offices after hours just to keep the family afloat. By his own account, the experience left him painfully aware of how fragile financial security could be, and how quickly it could disappear.

That fear stayed with him even as he chased comedy.

In 1985, an extremely broke and deeply depressed Jim Carrey drove his beat-up Toyota Camry into the Hollywood Hills. Parked above Los Angeles, staring down at a city that had yet to give him a break, he pulled out his checkbook and wrote himself a check for $10 million, made out to himself “for acting services rendered.” He postdated it ten years into the future and kept it folded in his wallet as a private promise.

Unbelievably, that prediction/dream came true.

When Carrey’s father died in 1994, Jim slipped the check into his father’s casket. Within the ten-year window he had imagined on that hillside, Jim Carrey had not only become a movie star, but he had become the most valuable comedic actor in Hollywood.

His financial ascent was as sudden as it was unprecedented. Carrey earned just $350,000 for the first “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” in 1994. The movie became a surprise smash and instantly turned him into a box office draw. By the end of that same year, his fee had exploded. He earned $540,000 for “The Mask,” which grossed more than $350 million worldwide, and an astonishing $7 million for “Dumb & Dumber.” The rise was capped by a $15 million paycheck for the 1995 sequel “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.”

In 1996, Jim Carrey became the first actor in history to command a $20 million upfront base salary for a single film. The movie was “The Cable Guy,” and the deal consumed nearly half of the film’s entire production budget. Adjusted for inflation, that $20 million paycheck is the equivalent of more than $34 million today. Carrey would go on to earn $20 million for “Liar Liar” and “Me, Myself & Irene.” Around this time, Jim was paid $20 million to star in Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

Before his Grinch payday, Jim had already earned around $80 million in his career. That’s the same as around $155 million today. More than enough, even after taxes, to ensure Jim would never be homeless again. So he could be a diva with his projects, energy, and emotion. But here’s the thing – financial trauma lives deep in a person’s bones and DNA, especially if that trauma occurs early in life. Someone who grew up cleaning offices and was homeless as a teenager does not casually walk away from an enormous payday. And yet, within a single day of filming “The Grinch,” Jim Carrey was so miserable, he offered to give his entire salary back.

(Photo by Universal/Getty Images)

Vulture.com just published an oral history of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to mark the film’s 25th anniversary. As Jim and Ron and various other participants recount, the trouble began immediately.

Playing the Grinch was not just a matter of wearing makeup. It was a full physical transformation that bordered on endurance training. Early in production, Carrey spent as long as eight hours a day in the makeup chair while a team of artists fitted him into a dense prosthetic mask and a full-body suit covered in coarse yak hair. The design required the tip of Carrey’s nose to be repositioned inside the mask, effectively sealing his nostrils and forcing him to mouth-breathe throughout the shoot.

The rest of the costume only compounded the misery. Carrey wore oversized prosthetic teeth that made speaking difficult, ten-inch-long finger extensions that prevented him from scratching an itch or touching his face, and full contact lenses that covered his entire eyeball, leaving him with tunnel vision. The yak hair suit was relentlessly itchy. The lenses were painful. The mask was claustrophobic.

Within days, the discomfort escalated into panic.

Director Ron Howard later recalled seeing Carrey lying flat on the floor between takes, breathing into a brown paper bag as he struggled to control anxiety attacks. The physical restrictions of the costume triggered a sense of confinement that Carrey found overwhelming. After just one day of filming under these conditions, he reached a breaking point.

Carrey told the filmmakers he was ready to quit. More astonishingly, he offered to return his entire $20 million salary. According to Howard, the offer was not a negotiating tactic. Carrey meant it. The role had become unbearable, and no amount of money seemed worth the daily torment.

For the production, this was an existential crisis. “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” was built entirely around Carrey’s performance. Recasting was unthinkable. Shutting down would have meant tens of millions in losses and an unfinished tentpole movie tied to one of the most valuable holiday properties in entertainment.

The solution they arrived at was extraordinary. Rather than redesigning the costume or drastically altering the production schedule, the filmmakers brought in an outside specialist whose background had nothing to do with acting or filmmaking. His expertise was teaching military and intelligence personnel how to endure extreme stress, confinement, and torture.

His job was simple: keep Jim Carrey from quitting.

Carrey later explained that the specialist taught him a series of coping techniques designed to interrupt panic spirals. When the anxiety set in, he was told to shock his nervous system with physical pain, such as punching his own leg or a trusted friend’s arm. He was encouraged to change sensory patterns in the room, turning off a television and switching on the radio, or consuming large amounts of food to redirect his focus.

With these strategies in place, and after further refinements to the prosthetics, the daily makeup process was eventually reduced from eight hours to roughly three. Carrey stayed. The production stabilized. The movie moved forward.

“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” became the highest-grossing domestic film of 2000 and a perennial holiday staple that continues to generate massive revenue through reruns, merchandise, and licensing more than two decades later.