Jim Carrey Doesn’t Exist (According to Jim Carrey)

As a young boy, Jim Carrey got in trouble for staring in the mirror. He didn’t do it because he was vain; he was practicing the comic skills that made him one of the great impressionists of our time, a man whose face seems to be made of some pliable alien material. Yet that malleable face is as capable of portraying deep and complex emotion as it is of making us laugh. As a result, Carrey’s career has been one reinvention after another. These days, he’s been lighting up Twitter as a political cartoonist—his way of drawing Donald Trump is particularly grotesque—and starring in the television series “Kidding.” He plays a children’s entertainer, in the mold of Mr. Rogers, who is struggling with the death of his own son. Carrey sat down with Colin Stokes at the New Yorker Festival in October, 2018. He spoke about his reverence for Fred Rogers and the inspiration he takes from Eastern philosophy. “I don’t exist,” Carrey says. “There’s no separation between you and me at all . . . I know I’m sounding really crazy right now, but it’s really true.”