10 Insane Skills Actors Learned For Movie Roles

2. Jim Carrey Learned How To Endure Torture (The Grinch)

The Walk
Universal Pictures

On the surface, The Grinch is a fairly light and entertaining Christmas-centric family comedy, hardly the type of movie you'd expect to be hiding a distressing and nightmarish underbelly. And yet... that's exactly what it's hiding.

Star Jim Carrey was decked out in layers upon layers of makeup for his role as the mean-spirited Grinch, which, obviously, required him to be stuck in the makeup chair for countless hours each and every day. It doesn't sound like a pleasant experience, but it might surprise you to learn just how unpleasant it really was.

On The Graham Norton Show in December 2014, Carrey revealed that the makeup process took a whopping eight-and-a-half hours to complete, making it borderline impossible for him to sit through on a regular basis.

So, producer Brian Grazer devised an unorthodox and rather bizarre solution: a specialist was brought in to teach Carrey how to endure torture. Seriously.

This gave the actor the strength to plant himself in that makeup chair for hours on end, day after day, and ultimately, his troubles paid off: while the movie was met with a middling reception overall, Carrey's crazy performance is easily one of its highlights.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.