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The actor’s recent appearance caused an internet spiral that suggests reality is slipping from our grasp. Are we entering a new age of authenticity?
Back in the 90s, Jim Carrey was a household name. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hadn’t heard of the actor or his bevy of successful movies – Ace Ventura, The Truman Show, Liar Liar, the list goes on.
Carrey had built a career with his face. What made him such a recognisable figure was his capacity to become wholly unrecognisable. Having started in the comedy circuit, the actor quickly climbed the ranks thanks to his physicality – warping his face into exaggerated expressions that allowed him to inhabit wild and irregular characters on the big screen.
This elastic expressiveness is also what helped Carrey take familiar figures like Dr Suess’ Grinch and completely reinvent them. But since the early noughties, he’s taken a step back from Hollywood and even spoken out against the industry’s penchant for egotistical navel gazing.
So it was a surprise to see Carrey dominate the headlines this week. He’d made a rare public appearance at the Cesar Awards on Sunday night, where he was accepting an honorary award for his ‘exuberant, unrestrained and unforgettable characters’. Only this time his fantastical face was making waves for a decidedly different reason.
A video of Carrey speaking to a journalist on the red carpet quickly amassed attention. Something wasn’t quite right. He looked… different? Some netizens began questioning whether it was Carrey at all – other’s suspected plastic surgery, perhaps a publicity stunt. Suddenly there were hundreds of social media posts dissecting the actor’s facial features. From tongue-in-cheek hypothesis about his filler routine to claims he was wearing facial tapes. Needless to say, heads were scrambled.
This hesitancy to believe what we see – particularly online – has become a defining factor of the AI age. We’re officially living in an uncanny valley, constantly wondering whether the images we’re fed are real or fake. Combined with the rapid development of plastic surgery, this unease trickles into our offline lives. We’re at the point of regularly questioning other people’s very existence.
It’s all fun, of course. At least in Carrey’s case. Alexis Stone – the performance artist and prosthetics wizard known for their incredibly celebrity transformations – claimed they were behind the actor’s odd appearance. If the comments are anything to go by, Stone’s AI-generated image of a prosthetic Jim Carrey mask fooled plenty of netizens. It was a black hole of fake news, an AI inception if you will. Nobody knew who to trust or what to believe.
