On June 5, 1999, Jim Carrey showed up to the MTV Movie Awards looking nothing like the rubber-faced comedian we’d come to know from movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber. Nominated for Best Male Performance for his role in The Truman Show, Carrey decided to attend that evening’s ceremony dressed up like a chain-smoking hippie who just got back from Woodstock, complete with long hair, a beard, and sunglasses.
MTV talent manager Art Arellanes remembered looking for Carrey in the green room, not knowing that he’d be in disguise. “I went in, I took one look at him, and I thought it was Rob Zombie,” Arellanes explained.
Evidently, Carrey hadn’t told anybody about his plan. He hid out in the crowd until Mike Myers and Janeane Garofalo announced him as the winner of the award. Carrey then took the stage and jokingly declared that he was embracing who he really was and accepting his trophy on behalf of his “new biker friends.” After singing a bit of Eric Clapton’s “Let It Grow,” Carrey addressed the MTV programming department, asking, “Would it kill you every once in a while to play a little Foghat?”
Jim Carrey Once Accepted an MTV Award as a Chain-Smoking Hippie Character
Myers and Garofalo played along as they escorted Carrey backstage. “Nothing to see here, folks. Get that camera off, for God’s sakes,” Myers barked while Foghat’s “Slow Ride” played in the background. But according to Garofalo, Carrey’s act didn’t end there. “Afterward when we were walking off, I tried to talk to him as Jim, and he wasn’t having it,” Garofalo recalled in 2009.
And Garofalo apparently wasn’t the only one Carrey refused to break character for. Carrey later revealed to MTV that he not only stuck to his guns while speaking with Samuel L. Jackson at the show, but he also managed to fool Jackson into thinking he was somebody else. “I talked to him for 15 minutes, and he had no idea,” Carrey boasted.
As Carrey tells it, Jackson eventually came up to him and said, “Man, why’d you do that to me?”
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