These How the Grinch Stole Christmas Secrets Are Pure Whobilation

Jim Carrey infamously went full method to play late comedian Andy Kaufman in the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon.

Which, since filming on How the Grinch Stole Christmas got underway that same year, resulted in some overlap for the star of both films.

"Jim Carrey didn't exist at that time," the actor told an audience at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, which hosted the premiere of the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – The Story of Jim Carrey & Andy Kaufman Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. "Andy actually affected the Grinch as well."

Namely, Carrey said he spent two hours on the phone with Howard one night going over notes, but in character as Andy.

"It was psychotic at times," he admitted.

Carrey even met with Theodore Geisel's—aka How the Grinch Stole Christmas author Dr. Seuss'—widow Audrey Geisel as Kaufman, according to director Ron Howard.

Audrey being the gatekeeper of her late husband's legacy and the one to say yea or nay to the project.

But apparently she appreciated Carrey's commitment to both characters.

"He invited Mrs. Geisel to the set," Howard told Empire in 2000, "and for a while he was talking to her like Andy Kaufman. And then he'd drop that and turn back to her and be the Grinch for a whole minute of Grinchiness, including the big grin, and she was totally enthralled. By the time I came to her with my idea, she said to me, 'I love it, and I want Jim Carrey to play the Grinch.' Which is what I wanted to hear because I probably wouldn't have done the movie with anyone else."

And it was only the beginning, as Carrey also voiced Horton in the 2008 animated hit Horton Hears a Who!

You can't tell when you're in Whoville (or on it), but the whole planet fits on a speck of dust, according to Dr. Seuss' 1954 book Horton Hears a Who!

And yes, according to Seuss canon lore, the microscopic Whos Horton hears are from the Whoville of How the Grinch Stole Christmas fame.

Taylor Momsen, who was 7 when she played Cindy Lou Who, would bring Carrey candy bars from his native Canada.

And he, in turn, told people that she "used to give him too much candy," so if he forgot his lines it was because he was "all hyped up" from the sugar, the Gossip Girl actress told E! in 2000. "That's just a funny story that he tells."

Meanwhile, though she remembered bringing him toffees and couldn't remember the name of the chocolate bar he said was his favorite, Carrey recalled being awash in his preferred confection.

"She was buying me Crunchies, which was my favorite Canadian chocolate bar," he told E!, "so she was plying me with Crunchies all the time."

Momsen said working with Oscar-winning Titanic composer James Horner on Cindy Lou's songs made her realize she wanted to make music more than anything.

"I'll never forget walking into this beautiful studio, with this immaculate console in front of me," the Pretty Reckless frontwoman said on TODAY in 2020, "and putting headphones on and singing into a microphone for the first time, singing 'Where Are You, Christmas?' That was such an impactful moment in my life because it made me go, 'I wanna make music for the rest of my life. I love being in a recording studio.'"

Performing the tune on set, Momsen said, "essentially, that was my first music video."

"We all knew we were part of something really special," Carrey told E!, recalling how every time he walked on set, he'd "just go, 'Come on, this is insane.'"

He explained, "I felt like I was part of The Wizard of Oz. I was just like, 'I wonder if they were thinking those things when they did that movie,’ because I was always amazed at what they came up with."

Meanwhile, Momsen did her communing with the 1939 Judy Garland classic before she came to set.

"I like all that imagination," she said. "I used to walk around the house dressed up as Dorothy or pretending I was Glinda."

Grinch-designated makeup artist Kazu Hiro's first design was deemed too transformative by the studio, which wanted Carey to be more recognizable, so he was asked to dial it back.

"The last one was only to paint him green with shadow and highlight and put on a wig," Hiro told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. "At first Jim wanted the lighter makeup, as light as possible, so he could move a lot. He made a videotape of himself making a Grinch face, and it looked great, but just painting him green and giving him a wig doesn’t make him a Grinch. He started to realize that, and he agreed that our approach was more the right way to do it."

So, after trying at least half a dozen iterations of Grinchdom, less than a week before shooting was due to start they went back to Hiro's initial design.

"An average day started at 5 or 6 in the morning," Hiro recalled, estimating he worked on Carrey four days a week for three months. "The makeup time itself was fairly short, about two hours and 10 minutes. With the help of my makeup assistant, Amy Schmiederer, I tried to work as quickly as possible because we didn’t want Jim to sit in the chair for a long time."

He continued, "There were three major steps in the makeup: to apply the foam rubber pieces on his face that covered almost everything but his lower lip and chin; to paint on the color and to put on the hairpieces and the wig. After each step, Jim would have a break of 10 to 30 minutes."

Keeping the makeup intact for the rest of the day was the real challenge, Hari shared, "because movement and sweating will affect how well the makeup stays on his face."

Carrey "was constantly moving around so there was constant touch-up on the set," Hari said. "But once Jim starts a scene, he wants to keep going and do it again and again and again. Every shot he did, he tried at least three times or more to come up with something better, and during that time he didn’t want to be touched up."

The artist wore a tool belt packed with supplies—makeup designer and supervisor Rick Baker estimated it weighed 100 pounds—so he could keep up with the star.

Baker and key hairstylist Gail Rowell-Ryan ended up winning the Oscar in 2001 for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Time did not make Carrey's heart grow fonder for the Grinch costume.

Getting into full makeup on day one took eight and a half hours, he recalled on The Graham Norton Show in 2014, comparing it to "being buried alive."

So, he continued, "I went back to my trailer and put my leg through the wall, and I told Ron Howard I couldn't do the movie. Then [producer] Brian Grazer came in and, being the fix-it man, came up with a brilliant idea, which was to hire a gentleman who is trained to teach CIA operatives how to do endure torture."

The advice, Carrey recalled, was to "eat everything you see and if you're freaking out and you start to spiral downward, turn the television on, change a pattern, have someone you know come up and smack you in the head. Punch yourself in the leg or smoke—smoke as much as you possibly can."

Asked how long this went on for, Carrey said he was in makeup 100 times.

"And you know what got me through it?" he added. "The Bee Gees."

Carrey wasn't joking about that.

"While I was doing the makeup, he would be watching a DVD or listening to music," Hiro told the LA Times. "Almost everyday he was playing a CD of 'Bee Gees Live.'" (Possibly 1977's Here at Last...Bee Gees...Live.)

"After a while I was doing the makeup in time with the album, and I could tell if I was a little bit late or a little bit fast by the music!" the artist said. "Then one Friday, Jim said, 'I want to take this album home today,' so we took it out of the CD player and gave it to him. But on Saturday, I was thinking: 'Maybe he’ll forget to bring it back, and that will mess up my rhythm with the makeup.' I went out and bought the same CD and brought it into the makeup trailer the next week."

Which was good thinking, he said, because Carrey did forget to bring the CD back.

Carrey later autographed Hiro's copy.

On the day Carrey recalled putting his leg through the wall, Hiro felt the tension in the air.

"Every first day has some kind of problem that you have to deal with, but this was actually the first time we tried the final design on Jim, and we were not sure if he would like it or not," he told the LA Times. "I was nervous, and Jim was nervous, too. As it turned out, he didn’t like the way his neck was covered with the hair, which was part of the wig, so we had to fix it right on the set, which meant we couldn’t start the shooting right away."

And, he added, "Jim is a perfectionist, and every time there was a change, he said something."

"The biggest problem with the makeup for Jim was the contact lenses," Hiro said. "They were using fake snow on the set, which was actually dried, smashed paper pulp, and on the set there were always tiny particles flying around in the air. The dust actually went between the lenses and his eyes, so he had a painful time."

Howard said Carrey was a guy who really couldn't wear contacts.

"But he had to, because he knew it was right for the character," the director told Empire. "But there were days when we had an optometrist standing by all the time with a super magnifying glass because he always got stuff in his eyes, and then we were told he couldn't film."

While Carrey's bare brown eyes really were aching to be uncovered, an editing oversight that went viral in 2022 left one frame in which the Grinch is finding out that Whoville is still awash in Christmas spirit despite his best efforts—and the actor's contact-less eyes are showing.

Carrey would waste no time getting de-Grinched after filming wrapped for the day.

"The lens technician, the suit technician and I would run over to him and start to remove everything we could on the set," Hari recalled to the LA Times. "All that would be left on him was the Grinch face without the hair and the black spandex suit he wore underneath the furry costume. Then he would go back to his trailer for a break, during which he would start peeling the makeup pieces off himself."

Carrey preserved pieces of the foam rubber he pulled off his face in a plastic bag with the day's call sheet and gave them to people on set to keep as souvenirs.

At the time, Hiro said all was well that ended well.

"About two months after the filming was completed, Jim and I talked again," he told the Times. "He said he admired me, and told me I did a great job and said thanks. I thanked him too, because he went through that whole thing. I think How the Grinch Stole Christmas was the hardest film I've ever worked on. It is a good memory, but if we had to do that again...we won’t do it!”

As it turned out, Hiro—who's won two Oscars since, for 2017's Darkest Hour and 2019's Bombshell—started therapy after his experience on HTGSC.

It got bad enough, Hiro told Vulture in 2018, that a producer suggested he leave to show Carrey how essential he was to the production. (The film's makeup department was huge, but among the credits Hiro is the only one dedicated to the Grinch.)

He didn't answer when Carrey called after a week, Hiro said, but Howard assured him the actor had sworn to change his ways.

While his friends encouraged him to ask for a big raise, the Kyoto-born artist continued, he decided he'd ask the studio for help getting a green card instead. 

It worked, and he's since become an American citizen. (And therapy helped him realize that he was "really an introvert.")

Frankenstein star Boris Karloff was the narrator and voiced the title character in the 1966 animated TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and many assumed he also sang the iconic "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."

He did not. Rather, the long-uncredited vocalist was Thurl Ravencroft, who also provided the voice for Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger for decades.

For the 2000 film, sans exclamation point, Carrey did his own vocal on the classic tune.

Howard admitted it was a "very unorthodox" production, because the set and costume designers—who at least had the framework of the children's book to go by—were waiting on the writers to finish the script.

Carrey's brain waited for no writer, however, and he improvised lines such as "6:30 p.m. Dinner with me. I can't cancel that again."

Howard has put his character actor brother Clint Howard in 17 of his films, from 1977's Grand Theft Auto to 2018's Solo: A Star Wars Story.

And that's Clint playing Mayor Augustus May Who sycophantic assistant Bris Who in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

Moreover, it was Clint who suggested his big brother don the Grinch makeup for a day as a morale booster.

"He said to me, 'You know, everybody's getting a little down. If there's maybe some kind of stunt you could pull, wear the make-up, let people know that you know it's tough,'" Howard told Empire. So, one day, "I slipped into the make-up chair at about 3:30 a.m. in the morning and donned the costume, and shocked Jim, and got a real cheap laugh out of the crew, and I think people appreciated that I was willing to endure at least one day." 

But he did not suffer the contacts. One, because it wasn't worth the expense to have a pair custom-made for one day, Howard said, but also, "frankly, I didn't want to wear the damn things."

Carrey was "having panic attacks" and "breathing into a paper bag" due to the claustrophobia he felt in the suit, Howard recalled, so the director was frequently trying to cheer the star up. (Before he was able to show Carrey the $350 million in worldwide box office receipts.)

Knowing the actor was a huge fan of Don Knotts, who played Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, Howard—who got his start as a child actor on the 1950s-era sitcom—had his former costar visit the set.

"I wish I'd had the camera rolling," Howard said on In Depth With Graham Bensinger in 2023, to capture "genius impressionist" Carrey doing "a perfect Don Knotts, in the Grinch costume."

Overall, Howard "understood the kind of agony [Carrey] was going through," he said. But, "you know, whatever he had to do he had to do."

And, er, why was Carrey doing this again?

He cited a longtime affinity for the Grinch for what drew him to the laborious project in the first place.

"The story of his change of heart has always been really important to me, that anybody’s reachable," he explained to E! in 2000. "Most people just want to be part of the party and part of the club, and if you give them the opportunity, they will be."

And he also wanted to call foul on the avarice.

"Just look at the book and look at what Dr. Seuss’s original intent was," Carrey continued. "I think he intended to show people what Christmas was all about, to show us ourselves at Christmas time...At the heart of Christmas, no matter how commercial it gets, it will get you because it means something. It’s about family and love and acceptance. It’s the thing that makes people realize we're all part of a family."