It’s nearly 30 years since the Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels movie premiered in cinemas on 16 December, 1994 (the film’s premiere took place 10 days earlier) and the flick has since been labelled a classic by fans.
The film tells the story of Lloyd Christmas (Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Daniels), two well meaning friends who set out on a cross country road-trip to return a briefcase – unaware that it was actually left as ransom money.
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Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber (New Line Cinema)
To celebrate the film’s 30th birthday, actress Karen ‘Duff’ Duffy, who played the film’s hitmen, shared a list of trivia about the film with PEOPLE – including a particularly grim medical scare which happened to Carrey while on set.
Turns out that Carrey had to take time off from filming after suffering a pretty grim gallbladder attack while on set.
“We were filming in the airport one day, and Jim doubled over and was rolling around,” Duffy recalled.
Unfortunately for Carrey, it took crew a short while to take his pain seriously as several people thought he was just joking around.
“The reaction from pretty much everybody on set was, ‘Oh, this is a prank. This is just Jim monkeying around’,” the actress explained, before going on to reveal that an on-set medic finally realised he wasn’t playing around.
This wasn’t even the most bizarre part of the story either, as Duffy asked to actor if he’d give her his gallstones after they were removed in surgery – to which Carrey agreed.
However Duffy’s plan to reuse the gallstones – which are hardened deposits of digestive fluid which form – as a gift for her co-star was never realised, as he gave them away before she could make it to the hospital.

Karen Duffy revealed the moment during an interview with PEOPLE
“He said okay. I was going to make him a set of cufflinks with them. And then I went to visit him in the hospital, and he told me he’d given them to the girl he was seeing,” she added.
Which is certainly an interesting gift to share with someone you’re seeing, let’s put it that way.
Duffy isn’t the only Dumb and Dumber alum whose mentioned Carrey’s gallbladder trouble over the years either, with writers Bobby and Peter Farrelly recalling the moment during promotion for 2014’s sequel Dumb and Dumber To, revealing that the actor had to film a fight scene.
“The first day that he came back from the surgery, we had him do this fight scene with Jeff where they’re fighting over the briefcase and they’re rolling around,” says Bobby explained to Hollywood Reporter at the time.
“It was the only night we could do it.”

It’s not unusual for people outside of Hollywood to consult on films in order to provide accuracy. However, when you think about The Grinch, the next thing which comes to mind probably isn’t the US intelligence agency.
And yet, this is exactly what happened on set of Ron Howard’s adaption of the Dr. Seuss classic.
But how, you ask? Well, Carrey himself has explained exactly how this happened during an interview on The Graham Norton Show.

Here are the techniques ways Jim Carrey relied on to get through filming for The Grinch (Getty Images)
During the interview Norton asked Carrey about a rumour that he’d previously trained with the navy seals and whether or not it was true. The 62-year-old confirmed that he had never trained with the Navy Seals, but he’d needed help from the CIA in order to get into character of the Grinch.
Literally.
“When I did The Grinch, the make-up was like being buried alive every day,” he explained, adding that it took ‘eight and a half hours’ to get into the famous green get-up.
“The makeup was like being buried alive, every day.”
The extensive prosthetics quickly took a toll on Carrey, with the actor recalling how he put his leg ‘through the wall’ in his trailer during a moment of frustration.
“I told Ron Howard I couldn’t do the movie,” he added.
The actor then went on to explain that producer and ‘fix-it man’ Brian Grazer was called in to intervene.
Grazer decided to call in a favour from a CIA operative who had experience in training agents in how to withstand torture.
Carrey was then taught how to do a series of ‘distraction techniques’ to get through the feeling of being held prisoner in his costume.
“If you’re freaking out and spiralling downward, turn the television on, change a pattern, or 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,” he explained.
“So that’s how I got through the Grinch.”

Who knew filming a kids movie would be so traumatic (Universal Pictures)
It’s quite a bizarre mental image to imagine Carrey smoking from a ‘giant cigarette holder’ so the hairy costume wouldn’t go up in flames and punching himself in the leg to get through acting in a children’s film.
The CIA torture methods weren’t the only techniques Carrey used either, with the acting that he also listened to The Bee Gees during his hundreds of times in the make-up chair.
We can only imagine how baffling the entire scenario must’ve looked to an outsider.

Carrey, now 62, has been a household name for decades, taking on heaps of iconic characters, including Ace Ventura, the Grinch, Bruce Nolan and Hank Evans.
He’s had a seriously impressive career, but recently claimed he ‘doesn’t exist’ and has always been one of his many characters.

Carrey once said he ‘didn’t exist’ (Gilbert Flores/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images)
Back in 2017, Carrey sat down with TIFF, where he spoke about his career. During the chat, he claimed that ‘Jim Carrey’ is one of the many characters he’s played over the years.
“I don’t exist, they’re all characters that I played, including Jim Carrey, including Joel Barish,” he said.
“They’re all characters. Jim Carrey was a less intentional character because I thought I was just building something people would like, but it was a character.
“I played the guy who was free from concern so that people who watched me would be free from concern.
“… Depression is your body saying ‘f**k you, I don’t want to be this character anymore, I don’t want to hold up this avatar you’ve created, it’s too much for me’.”
Jim Carrey finishing joke 18 years later.
In a separate chat during a New York Fashion Week red carpet interview – also in 2017 – Carrey echoed a similar sentiment, telling the reporter: “There is no me. There are just things happening.
“Here’s the thing. It’s not our world. We don’t matter. There’s the good news.”
However, he later clarified what he meant.
Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival, he told TheWrap: “As an actor you play characters, and if you go deep enough into those characters, you realise your own character is pretty thin to begin with. You suddenly have this separation and go, ‘Who’s Jim Carrey? Oh, he doesn’t exist actually’.”

Carrey spoke about his many characters (
He continued: “There’s just a relative manifestation of consciousness appearing, and someone gave him a name, a religion, a nationality, and he clustered those together into something that’s supposed to be a personality, and it doesn’t actually exist. None of that stuff, if you drill down, is real.
“I believe I got famous so I could let go of fame, and it’s still happening, but not with me. I’m not a part of it anymore. Dressing happens, doing hair happens, interviewing happens, but it happens without me, without the idea of a ‘me.’ You know what I’m saying?
“It’s a weird little semantic jump, and it’s not that far, but it’s a universe apart from where most people are.”

That’s because social media users haven’t stopped applauding his improvisation skills after people realised that an iconic scene featured in How the Grinch Stole Christmas wasn’t actually part of the script. Iconic The Grinch scene that wasn’t part of the script.
There are many memorable moments in the legendary festive film, based on Dr Seuss’ 1957 children’s book, which follows the Grinch’s mission to sabotage Whoville’s holiday fun.
Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman wrote the screenplay for the movie which was released 23 years ago and littered it with comedic lines for the stroppy Scrooge-like protagonist to deliver.
Carrey did a great job of bringing the grumpy green character to life, but he didn’t always stick to the script.
The actor, 61, was forced to think on his feet during one hilarious scene where the Grinch was taking a look at his ‘busy’ schedule while attempting to find an outfit to go out in.
The people of Whoville had sent him a last-minute invite them to join him for some festive fun at their ‘Holiday Cheermeister’, but as we all can all recall, he has nothing to wear and his diary is chock-a-block.

You know the bit – “One o’clock, wallow in self-pity. Four thirty, stare into the abyss. Five o’clock, solve world hunger – tell no one. Five thirty, Jazz-ercise. Six thirty, dinner with me. I can’t cancel that again! Seven o’clock, wrestle with my self-loathing…I’m booked!”
The Grinch turns to a tablecloth to save him from his fashion nightmare, which is lay over a table covered in pots, pans and God knows what else.
Carrey trots over to the table inside his Mount Crumpit cave and rips it clean off – expertly performing the tablecloth trick, as all the bits and bobs remain perfectly in place. But that wasn’t how the scene was supposed to happen.

The Christmas-hating creature was actually meant to create a complete mess when dragging the fabric off to make himself a DIY dress – I mean kilt, sorry.
To the film crews surprise, Carrey was a tablecloth trick master and didn’t disturb a single dish, despite the fact he was directed to send everything flying.
But instead of calling ‘cut’ and reshooting the scene, the quick-thinking star ad libbed his way through it on the spot.
After walking out of shot, he then ran back towards the table and threw its contents onto the ground – before flipping the entire table for good measure.
Carrey previously told Entertainment Tonight that ‘there was lots of improv’ in the festive family favourite.
“Like the moment of the behind the screen dressing thing that was not a planned thing,” he added. “It was, just you know, I just thought it’ll be funny to just have this monster transformation that you want to see how it turns out.”
Social media users said it ‘made the scene even better’ to know that Carrey came up with it himself.
One wrote: “This is why Jim Carrey is the goat. Made it way funnier and it was ad libbed?”
Another said: “And it became one of the best scenes!”
A third added: “The fact that he pulled the table down too – legendary.”
A fourth chimed in: “This is my favourite scene in the movie.”
And a fifth added: “No way…that is improv at it’s best! Bravo.”

When it comes to failing relationships and break-ups, we’ve all been there and it’s fair to say that most of us don’t want to have our most painful memories dredged up while enjoying a film or TV show.
However, every now and again you’ll get a film that’s so well made it’s worth watching through the tears, like this 2004 romance film starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Written by Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind proves that opposing genres such as romance and sci-fi can actually come together in order to create a meaningful piece of cinema.
The film opens with Joel Barish (Carrey) discovering that his ex-girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Winslet) has opted to undergo a procedure which will permanently remove him from her mind.
Hurt by her decision, Joel decides to have the exact same procedure performed, however, things turn out to be a little more complicated when he realises the implications of wiping an entire two year relationship from his brain. Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood also star in the movie.

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind has received praise from both fans and critics alike over the years, with many people enjoying the film’s portrayal of the volatile nature of romantic relationships, as well as the value of painful memories rather than simply forgetting them.
The film would go on to win an Oscar and a BAFTA for Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth’s screenplay.
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind has since remained one of the most highly rated films of the twenty-first century two decades since its release, with the film currently sitting on a total of 92% on film aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the script as well as the performances from the two leading actors.
The film is also highly rated amongst film fans on Letterboxd, currently holding a strong score of 4.2 after over 250,000 reviews.

“Best movie I’ve ever seen, honestly, every time I watch it again it’s like it’s the first time,” one person wrote in their review, while another person called it: “One of the craziest most depressive movie experiences i’ve ever had. when the movie was over i literally had to turn off my tv and just think for 5 minutes.”