Jim Carrey took a break from roasting Hollywood to announce some “fairly serious” news. The 60-year-old actor said he’s retiring from acting for the foreseeable future.
“Well, I’m retiring,” Carrey told Access Hollywood. “Yeah, probably. I’m being fairly serious.”
The comedian is promoting Sonic the Hedgehog 2, his first film in two years — and he has nothing lined up next. Carrey isn’t ruling out some kind of return to film or television later on, but it would have to be a great project.
“If the angels bring some sort of script that’s written in gold ink that says to me that it’s going to be really important for people to see, I might continue down the road, but I’m taking a break,” he continued.
Carrey added, “I really like my quiet life and I really like putting paint on canvas and I really love my spiritual life and I feel like — and this is something you might never hear another celebrity say as long as time exists — I have enough. I’ve done enough. I am enough.”
This isn’t the first time Carrey has retreated to enjoy his “quiet life.” After 2014’s Dumb and Dumber To, the actor clearly became very choosy about his projects. He shot two independent films released in 2016 and filmed 20 episodes of Showtime’s Kidding. In 2020, Carrey starred in his first major studio film in six years with the first Sonic. He also guest-starred as President Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live.
Carrey has made headlines this week for his unfiltered thoughts on the Will Smith slap.
“I see it as a larger issue, and it’s an issue of the boundaries being broken – boundaries and allowances and permissiveness to certain behaviors,” Carrey told the AP. “The fact is that license is being given to people to act out violently when they don’t like what they hear. And it just shouldn’t be.”
The actor continued, “I also think that people not unlike Will, or myself, we live in a lot of pressure. We set up a lot of pressure for ourselves, [and] we’re encouraged by this country to never stop and never be satisfied and never look at our lives and going, ‘You know what? I’m enough. I have enough. I’ve done enough. I don’t need nine businesses.”
Carrey said Smith cracked “under the pressure.”
“That’s what that was. It was more than just an insult to someone’s wife. Jada’s a tough girl. She can defend herself. She wasn’t being physically attacked. What that was was someone who was beyond the bandwidth, and he thought more about how he was looking in that moment than what was the right thing to do,” he added. “I don’t condemn him for it. It’s just wrong.”
