Some of the visitors of Universal Studios Hollywood got a little more bang for their buck than they were probably expecting while taking the world-famous Studio Tour in the winter of 1998. As the tour’s tram made its way to the Bates Motel set from 1960’s Psycho, a man dressed up like Norman Bates’s mother jumped out and scared the hell out of everyone by approaching them with either an axe or a rubber knife (depending on the source). “The driver, the tour guide, nobody had any clue what was going on,” the park’s creative director, John Murdy, told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “He just came out as the mother with a rubber knife.”
As it turned out, the man in question was Jim Carrey, who was shooting the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon on the Universal lot at the time. When the tram operators talked to the film crew about the incident, they were told that Carrey was just trying to channel Kaufman’s creative energy. Since then, an actor playing Norman Bates has been added to the attraction. After he’s spotted putting a body in the trunk of a car, Norman pulls a knife from his jacket and starts walking toward the tram menacingly:
Carrey didn’t just pull the prank on random strangers, either. One day during filming, his Man on the Moon co-star Norm Macdonald came to have lunch with him by the Bates mansion set behind the motel. In a video that surfaced more recently, Macdonald is seen checking out the house just before Carrey runs out the front door in a dress and lunges at him with an axe, lending some credibility to the idea that it was his weapon of choice for the tram stunt. Take a look at the video below.
When Carrey returned to the lot the following year to film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, he wanted to repeat his previous stunt while he was in his full Grinch make-up. The studio wouldn’t allow it, however, because the make-up was being kept under wraps until they got closer to the release date. He later pulled off a more rehearsed version of the stunt on Conan O’Brien’s show. The park has held its annual “Grinchmas” celebration every year since the movie was released, with the character sometimes taking over the tour’s tram to promote the event:
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