Jim Carrey had to go through…torture training to play the Grinch??
2025 marks 25 years since Ron Howard’s live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas changed our lives forever. In honor of the anniversary, Vulture published an oral history about the making of the film. In it, the cast and crew go behind the scenes about what is still possibly one of the craziest films of our time, for so many reasons.
One of the biggest takeaways from it involves star Jim Carrey’s arduous time in makeup for the Grinch. It has been known that the 8-hour process was rough on the star, but Carrey, Howard, and producer Brian Glazer go into detail, which involves…torture training?
Due to the extensive prosthetics, some of which physically were painful, Carrey was ready to quit the film and return his $20 million. They knew they couldn’t lose him, so Grazer had a final Hail Mary on a man who had trained in the military on enduring imprisonment and torture.
It worked.
“Richard Marcinko was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special-ops people how to endure torture,” said Carrey. “He gave me a litany of things that I could do when I began to spiral. Like punch myself in the leg as hard as I can. Have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm. Eat everything in sight. Changing patterns in the room. If there’s a TV on when you start to spiral, turn it off and turn the radio on. Smoke cigarettes as much as possible. Later on I found out that the gentleman that trained me to endure the Grinch also founded SEAL Team Six.”
They also also made concessions in the production schedule. With Grinch falling in between practical effects and the CGI boom of the early 2000s, their decision to do most of the film practically makes sense. If they did it now, there would probably be a lot more CGI. Sorry, Jim Carrey. But we loved your work in this role.
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