The Oscar winner who needed therapy after working with Jim Carrey: “He was really mean to everybody”
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 10 January 2026 20:15, UK
What is it with comedy actors who love burying themselves under prosthetics, mugging for the cameras, and playing multiple roles in the same movie being difficult on set? Jim Carrey wasn’t the first, and based on history, he won’t be the last, either. That said, he might be the only one to send someone to therapy.
Then again, you never know. After all, Bill Murray has been terrorising co-stars, colleagues, filmmakers, and producers for decades, creating a bizarre two-sided persona where he’s one of cinema’s most beloved comedic veterans, albeit one that a lot of people are adamant is a complete dickhead.
You can’t talk about tetchy comics without mentioning Mike Myers, either, who emerged as one of the genre’s most famous men of many faces in the 1990s, and promptly spent the next decade and a half being plagued by tales of ego trips, sabotage, and generally dickish behaviour on almost every film.
Ironically, both Carrey and Myers were heavily inspired by the late and legendary Peter Sellers, who was the worst of the bunch. By many accounts, he was an absolute nightmare to deal with, and he had no problems in sabotaging entire productions on a whim, making several enemies along the way.
If there’s one defensible aspect to Carrey’s antics, it’s that he was fucking miserable. Spending hours a day being caked in green latex and fur to play the title character in Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas made him so angry that he threatened to quit and return his $20 million salary, and he only made it through the shoot with the help of some CIA training.
Obviously, that doesn’t make it OK for him to be a nuisance, with makeup artist Kazu Hiro bearing the brunt. The winner of the Academy Award for ‘Best Makeup and Hairstyling’ for Darkest Hour, and a nominee for Click, Norbit, Bombshell, and Maestro, who also worked on Men in Black, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, and Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy, he’s one of the best in the business.
“Once we were on set, he was really mean to everybody, and at the beginning of the production, they couldn’t finish,” he explained to Vulture. “After two weeks we only could finish three days’ worth of shooting schedule, because suddenly he would just disappear, and when he came back, everything was ripped apart. We couldn’t shoot anything.”
Hiro recalled one “particularly terrible” day with Carrey, who called him out for painting his chin a slightly different colour than it had been the day before. “Every day was like that,” he said, which saw him come up with a novel solution; the makeup artist vanished from the set so that the actor would see how important he was to the process. After a week, he agreed to return, but only if he got a pay raise and letters of recommendation to secure his green card.
Once production had wrapped, Hiro realised that he’d reached a turning point in his life, and started seeing a therapist. “I don’t like to be in many groups of people, or work under those conditions,” he explained. “The anxiety of what could happen in the next moment, maybe the actor freaks out or changes their mind, always being ready for it.” It wasn’t the happiest experience of his career, but at least there was a silver lining.
Related Topics
