The ‘Jim Carrey is a clone’ theory is absurd. Of course people believe it | Dave Schilling

8 hours ago 2

Last week, my ex-wife texted me. She usually does that when my son falls off his skateboard or learns a new expletive to say on the playground. This time was different. “Have you seen Jim Carrey?” she asked, apropos of nothing we had discussed previously. It was as if she was asking me if I’d seen her misplaced keys.

“No, I have not seen Jim Carrey. Have you looked under the couch?” I replied.

“Seriously, Google him,” she said.

And so, dear reader, I did. What I found has haunted me all week. Not because I find Jim Carrey’s new face in any way disturbing, but because it seems that millions of other people who have never met Jim Carrey do.

Almost immediately after Carrey appeared at the César awards in Paris to accept a lifetime achievement award, the internet lit up with the preposterous, but tantalizing theory that the actor who first came to prominence for talking out of his own butt in a movie had been replaced by a clone who had never once talked out of his own butt, because he was just hatched a few days ago.

Why did people decide that they’d put their own reputations as sane individuals on the line to declare a hoax perpetrated by the star of Mr Popper’s Penguins? Because Jim Carrey’s face looked a little different. His cheeks were fuller. His eyelids pulled up. Worse yet for the Carrey truthers, he wasn’t grinning like a buffoon the entire time or farting La Marseillaise on command. Surely, Jim Carrey, a 64-year-old adult man, couldn’t be expected to accept an award with grace and dignity. No, he needed to breach the womb of a rubber rhinoceros, then accept the trophy in the nude. That’s the real Jim Carrey, metaphorically biting the heads off chickens for our amusement. This Jim Carrey – this rank imposter – must have been hatched in a laboratory using the same technology that cloned Tom Brady’s dog.

Now, not everyone said Carrey was specifically snatched out of the world and replaced with an artificially created double. Some people, like my ex, were more open to less sci-fi rationales.

“That’s not Jim Carrey,” she declared with no hint of doubt. “I know what Jim Carrey looks like. That’s not him.” Perhaps it was a performer in a mask or some elaborate Mission: Impossible disguise. Any minute now, Tom Cruise would rip a latex appliance off his face and appear before us to leap on to another couch or eat popcorn one kernel at a time. I did my best not to launch into a series of digital snickers or clown emojis. After all, I need to keep this woman on my side, both before and after her Jim Carrey-related nervous breakdown.

But then the performance artist, Alexis Stone, posted an Instagram photo subtly taking credit for the Carrey appearance without saying explicitly that it was them under a mask. I mean, if you post a photo of a Jim Carrey mask with the caption “Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris”, it’s not a huge leap for a viewer to assume the Carrey incident was all a big ruse.

What was beginning to form around me was a mass psychosis event, one where even Megan Fox was declaring: “i can’t handle any more stress right now i need to know if this is real.” People began acting like a close relative had been secretly feeding government secrets to Chinese intelligence agents. And was also a Klingon.

For decades, Jim Carrey aged in a way that was acceptable to everyone around him. In the years since he became a world-famous movie star, his face has been on display at a massive scale, allowing us to stare and gawk at every inch of him on billboards and onscreen. For millennials like myself, the creases and lines on his head are like cave paintings of our childhood. But if your father or mother started looking a bit different, would you accuse them of being a clone? And if you did, would you be mad if they slapped you?

While people devolved deeper into conspiracy theories, the more rational among us asked some simple questions: why would Jim Carrey commission a clone? Where does the clone sleep? In Jim’s bed? In a dog house in the backyard? Maybe the clone has its own multi-million dollar home? How much does a clone cost, factoring in tariffs and inflation? If you can just make clones, why haven’t the Dodgers cloned Shohei Ohtani by now? Can Jim Carrey’s clone vote?

All of this speculation is really moot, though, considering Carrey’s representatives completely denied it wasn’t him at the Césars, that he practiced his speech in French for months, and that he had attended the ceremony with his family. Case closed.

Or not.

I still see people sure that his eye color is different now, that they can see the seams of the mask on his face. That they know Jim Carrey so well that they can’t be fooled by a cheap imposter. They can’t believe what they hear or what they see.

The internet has scrambled our minds beyond recognition. Someone must always be conspiring behind our backs, attempting to alter our reality and reshape it in whatever way they see fit. I’m not arrogant or myopic enough to say I don’t see how secret worlds and deception can flourish under our noses. The torrent of Jeffrey Epstein emails are proof of how we don’t really know anything about the celebrities or politicians that sit at the top of the social pyramid. Sometimes, skepticism is the healthiest intellectual response we can have.

But if that skepticism comes from believing that you “know” the famous movie star Jim Carrey, then manifests itself in forensic examinations of low-resolution photos and deranged TikTok videos, then it might be time to ponder the touching of the grass that the kids talk about so often.

Still, I don’t blame the people having these reactions. If you’ve been lied to repeatedly by your government, your business leaders, and your venerated celebrities, you’ll be on high alert at all times – prepared to absorb the next betrayal. Live long enough in this age of techno-oligarchs and 24/7 propaganda and you’ll assume everyone is talking out of their butts, especially Jim Carrey.