“I started out performing as a little boy, I was trying to make my mother feel better and laugh because she was sick and in pain all the time,” said Jim Carrey. “I found out that I had that power to relieve her.”
Born on January 17, 1962, in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, the actor, and comedian first began performing in elementary school and was already doing standup at a local comedy club by the time he was 15. Carrey continued performing and after impressing the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield he ended up opening up for him on tour in the early 1980s.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1983, Carrey debuted his impressions act on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson while getting film roles, including Francis Ford Coppola’s 1986 comedy Peggy Sue Got Married and later in the 1988 thriller The Dead Pool and comedy Pink Cadillac, both starring Clint Eastwood.
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Though Carrey was rejected by Lorne Michaels after auditioning for Saturday Night Live twice—once in 1980 and again for the 1985-1986 season—five years later he landed his breakout role on the sketch comedy In Living Color, which he starred in 1990 through 1994. Coincidentally, Carrey would go on to host SNL three times in 1996, 2011, and 2014.
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From In Living Color, Carrey’s career took off with starring roles in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, The Cable Guy, Liar, Liar, and The Truman Show, which won him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama. By 1999, Carrey portrayed late comedian Andy Kaufman in the drama Man on the Moon and picked up another Golden Globe along with a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Best Actor.
Throughout the 2000s, more films rolled in—Me, Myself & Irene, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Bruce Almighty, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and more. Carrey also won a Grammy in 2006 for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning.
“What I do as an art form is try to make people feel good and if I do try to make them feel bad, it’s for a reason,” said Carrey. “There’s something I am trying to say.”
In the early 2010s, Carrey also began revisiting his other passion as a visual artist and can also add songwriter to his list of credits. Here’s a look at three songs Carrey wrote or co-wrote throughout a nearly 30-year span from 1994 through 2022.
1. “Heaven Down Here,” Tuck & Patti (1994)
Written by Jim Carrey, John Shanks, Phil Roy, Rick Neigher
Around the time Carrey’s run on In Living Color was coming to an end, he and his friend Phil Roy wrote a love song for Tuck & Patti, a San Francisco-based husband and wife duo of guitarist William Charles “Tuck” Andress and singer Patricia “Patti” Cathcart Andress. Carrey’s ballad, “Heaven Down Here,” appeared on the couple’s 1995 album Learning How To Fly.
“He really didn’t write it for us but he is credited with the idea for the song as well as some of the lyrics,” said Tuck. “However, when it was presented to us by Ken Komisar we had no idea Jim wrote it.” Patti added, “We just fell in love with it instantly.”
What are you waiting for, Believe in me
Isn’t it love in this life that you need
You can offer your soul to an altar of sacrifice
But give your heart to me
Let’s bring heaven down here
Let’s bring Heaven on down
I don’t want to wait for the angels
Let’s bring Heaven down here
What’s in the sky that you and I can’t find
Simply in love what could be more divine
How can I make you believe forever and ever more
I’ll give my love to you
Tuck & Patti first broke out with their 1988 debut Tears of Joy and released more albums through I Remember You in 2007. Together for more than 40 years, the couple have toured alongside everyone from Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Count Basie, and George Benson, among others.
2. “Cold Dead Hand” (2013)
Written Jim Carrey
In response to gun violence and the lack of gun control laws, Jim Carrey wrote “Cold Dead Hand” and performed it with The Eels, playing as Lonesome Earl and the Clutterbusters. The title was a play on something the late actor Charlton Heston, who was the former president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) said during an NRA convention in 2000: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
In the music video for “Cold Dead Hand,” Carrey is portraying Heston appearing in an episode of the late-’60s to early 1980s variety show Hee Haw. The Eels are his backing band, dressed as John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, and Abraham Lincoln, who advocated for peace and were killed by gun violence.
“I find the gun problem frustrating,” said Carrey, and ‘Cold Dead Hand’ is my fun little way of expressing that frustration.”
Some folks ride like the wind
With the whispering pines to guide them
And the burning light inside them
Keeps them warm in the snow
Others fear the sounds they hear
Make bandito’s out of mole-hills
Fill their hearts with porcupine quills
They’re dead and buried long before they go
Charlton Heston movies are no longer in demand
His immortal soul my lay forever in the sand
The angels wouldn’t take him up to heaven like he planned
‘Cause they couldn’t pry that gun from his cold dead hand
It takes a cold dead hand to decide to pull the trigger
It takes a cold dead heart and as near as I can figure
With your cold dead aim you’re trying to prove your dick is bigger
But we know your chariot may not be swinging low
3. “Phantom Regret by Jim,” The Weeknd (2022)
Written by Jim Carrey, Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd), Daniel Lopatin, Martin Max Sandberg, Matthew David Cohn, Oscar Thomas Holter
The Weeknd‘s fifth album PM Dawn features narration by Jim Carrey, along with guest vocals by and spoken word by Quincy Jones, Lil Wayne, Tyler, the Creator, and filmmaker Josh Safdie. Carrey is featured on three songs, including the opening title track, along with “Out of Time,” and “Phantom Regret by Jim,” which the actor and comedian co-wrote with The Weeknd.
In the spoken word poem, which closes PM Dawn, Carrey asks questions like How many grudges did you take to your grave? When you weren’t liked or followed, how did you behave?
You’re tuned to Dawn FM
The middle of nowhere on your dial
So sit back and unpack
You may be here awhile
Now that all future plans have been postponed
And it’s time to look back on the things you thought you owned
Do you remember them well?
Were you high or just stoned?
And how many grudges did you take to your grave?
When you weren’t liked or followed, how did you behave?
Was it often a dissonant chord you were strumming?
Were you ever in tune with the song life was humming?
If pain’s living on when your body’s long gone
And your phantom regret hasn’t let it go yet
You may not have died in the way that you must
All specters are haunted by their own lack of trust
When you’re all out of time, there’s nothing but space
No hunting, no gathering
No nations, no race
And Heaven is closer than those tears on your face
The lyrics also give a nod to Prince and his 1984 album Purple Rain: And Heaven is closer than those tears on your face / When the purple rain falls /We’re all bathed in its grace.
PM Dawn topped the R&B/Hip-Hop chart and went to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart.
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Carrey and Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd), first connected through filmmakers Benjamin and Josh Safdie. “Abel told me that he was a fan of ‘The Mask,’ that that’s the first movie he ever saw and that inspired him to be in show business when he was a kid, so that was kind of a thrill,” said Carrey in 2022.
The two eventually met on Tesfaye’s 30th birthday. “We’d been texting prior to that,” said Tesfaye. “And then, on my 30th birthday, he surprised me. He just pulled up to my crib and took me to breakfast. He lived literally, like two buildings down from me. He had a telescope, and I had a telescope. He was like, ‘Where do you live? What floor do you live on?’ And we looked out the windows on our telescopes and we could see each other.”
In the video for “Out of Time,” Carrey makes a cameo, along with Hoyeon of Squid Game, and is coincidentally covered in a mask.
Photo: Rich Fury/WireImage
