By Elias Marat | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
(TMU) – Actor Jim Carrey rose to fame in the 1990s through his slap-stick brilliance and amazingly rubber-faced roles, ranging from Fire Marshall Bill to Ace Ventura, Lloyd Christmas, and Andy Kaufman.
In the past two decades, however, the 58-year-old performer has revealed his more thoughtful and artistic tendencies, as well as his morose and sensitive side.
The actor has now revealed the painful time when he was told that he only had “10 minutes to live.”
The actor was on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon promoting his new autobiographical novel, “Memoirs and Misinformation,” when the host asked Carrey what the inspiration was behind the front cover, which shows his face.
Carrey explained how he had been writing the book on the beaches of Hawaii back in January 2018 when his assistant called him in tears to explain that they only had 10 minutes to live because of an impending missile strike.
“She was crying and she was saying, ‘Chief, the missiles are coming. It’s real, and we have 10 minutes before they hit from North Korea,’” Carrey said in a separate interview with USA Today. “We had no idea that it was a false missile alert, so to us, it was happening.”
During the alarming video call, the assistant accidentally captured a screenshot of Carrey’s face while he was reeling from the news.
“That cover is somebody staring at infinity, staring at eternity,” Carrey said. “And it wasn’t panic. It was more the feeling of, ‘Wow, that’s weird. Huh. That’s how it’s gonna end? Strange.’”
At that point, the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind began a brief, mad scramble to escape what he believed could be his sure death in a missile strike. Eventually, however, he accepted his fate and used the time to reach out to his good friends.
“At that point, I started going, ‘OK what can I do with this last moment of time,’” he told Fallon. “I just decided to go through a list of gratitudes and honest to God I just could not stop thinking of wonderful things that have happened to me and blessings I’ve had.”
“It was lovely,” he continued. “And I got to a point of grace at about two minutes to spare when I found out it wasn’t actually happening.”
Carrey then realized that his rollercoaster ride of a lifetime, filled with thrilling ups and devastating downs, was actually a blessing to be grateful for.
“All I was planning to do was close my eyes and be thankful because it’s been a good ride,” he added.
One can only imagine his sense of relief when it turned out that the ballistic missile alert from the U.S. Emergency Alert System and Commercial Mobile Alert System had actually turned out to be false, and he was going to be safe.
When he found out that the alarm was actually a mistake, Carrey said: “I got p**ed off and heads rolled!”
Carrey feels that the candid image of his confused and stunned face is a fitting cover for his new book. According to Kirkus, the book is a “mad fever dream” that “careens from midlife blues through love and career complications toward the apocalypse” and includes “gems of comic fantasy and the nuggets of memoir gold.”
