10 Insane Skills Actors Learned For Movie Roles

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

The Grinch
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.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!