04/01/2026
Jim Carrey is usually not considered a serious actor, but he is seriously dedicated to his roles.
I'm going to go against typical narrative convention here and start our story with another tangent within our current tangent. While I was looking through Carrey's filmography as a lead actor, I realised just how consistently moderately successful he is.
This is a list of films starring Carrey as the lead actor. The bars in red are those that did not make between $100m and $400m at the box office. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), the median film of his lead acting career, is in green, and it's the topic of the original tangent.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas is just one of the many moderately successful movies in Carrey's career, but it was undoubtedly the most brutal for him. His big, hairy, ugly Grinch costume from the film is instantly recognizable (and one that I hate looking at), but that's the thing, it isn't actually a costume in the traditional sense. It wasn't a suit, but instead a combination of makeup, facial prosthetics, and green yak hair stuck to Carrey's body. Every time he needed to dress up as The Grinch for filming, he had to endure a multi-hour makeup routine handled by a two-person team, an experience he described as "being buried alive". Carrey's nose was covered, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, the yak hair made him itchy all over, and his thick contact lenses limited his vision. He claims that on the first day he had to do this, the routine took eight and a half hours.
The experience quickly drove him insane. It was like torture. How do you go through that and then walk onto a set and act, to perform the type of high-energy expressive role that people expect from Jim Carrey? Much of the production team was stunned by his abiility to pull off such expressive physical humor given the circumstances. Eventually the makeup team found their stride and the schedule reduced to 2.5 hours for application and an hour for removal, but he was still being pushed to his limit, and he began to take it out on the rest of the production team. He kicked holes in the wall of his trailer. He shouted at the makeup crew over minor details. At times he would disappear, and when he came back the team would find he had ripped his prosthetics apart in a panic attack.
The star of our second tangent-within-a-tangent is makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji, who was quickly growing mentally exhausted from the long hours and the beratement from Carrey. Eventually, he gave up, and met with the other makeup artist Rick Baker to come up with a plan. Tsuji decided to leave the team, leaving just Baker to do the routine, until Carrey would realise his importance. After a week of hiding, Carrey called. Tsuji didn't answer, and he didn't call back. Then director Ron Howard called, leaving a message saying Carrey had sworn to change. Tsuji eventually returned, under two conditions: Carrey would manage his temper, and for Tsuji's work on The Grinch (Which would win him a BAFTA for best makeup), the filmmakers would write letters of recommendation to help him get his green card and stay in the U.S. He also began seeing a therapist.
But Carrey was still slipping, and he knew he wasn't going to be able to keep his emotions in check for the rest of the shoot, so he met with producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and told them he wasn't going to be able to do The Grinch. He was ready to return the $20 million he was offered to do the role. In order to keep him on, the producers came up with a solution.
Enter: Richard Marcinko.
Jim Carrey's story of being buried alive in prosthetics is how I discovered this guy, but we're gonna take the long route to get back to that point. Marcinko is the quintessential hollywood badass. Born in 1940, he dropped out of high school and joined the U.S Navy when he turned 18. By 1961 he was part of the Underwater Demolition Teams, a group of covert demolition experts who had been critical in the Korean War. By 1965 he was an officer, and by 1966 he was in the recently-formed SEAL Team Two. Soon afterward he was deployed to Vietnam, where he and his team were extremely successful: He led assaults that sunk Vietnamese boats and killed Viet Cong by the dozens, he rescued American nurses during the Tet Offensive, the Vietnamese had supposedly placed a bounty on his head, and after two tours in Vietnam he had assumed command of SEAL Team Two in 1974. He once stated "Even in Vietnam, the system kept me from hunting and killing as many of the enemy as I would have liked." He's that kind of person.
In April 1980 the Department of Defense conducted Operation Eagle Claw, an attempt to rescue 52 members of the American embassy during the Iran hostage crisis, and an operation Marcinko had helped plan. It was a complete failure: Of the eight personnel transport helicopters sent out to the staging area for the operation, only five arrived intact. President Jimmy Carter then aborted the mission, and while the helicopters were withdrawing one of them collided with another transport aircraft, killing multiple people. In the wake of this failure, the Navy realised the need for a dedicated counter-terrorist team and placed Marcinko in charge of its development. The end result was the now-famous SEAL Team Six. It's a common misconception that SEAL Team Six was called that because it was six guys, there were actually around 75. Nor was it actually the sixth SEAL team, it was only the third after teams one and two, Marcinko claimed he chose the name to fool America's enemies into believing there were more teams that they didn't know about. SEAL Team Six is famous for being one of the U.S. Army's most elite groups; It had an intensive mental and physical training program that even most existing SEAL members couldn't make it through, they had virtually unlimited resources at their disposal, and they were the ones who assassinated Osama bin Laden in 2011. They are badasses, the most badass badasses you could think of. Your dad probably likes to imagine what it would be like if he was one.
After Marcinko's period as commander of SEAL Team Six was up, he and a dozen former members from the unit went on to form the highly classified "Red Cell", who were tasked with testing the security of the Navy's installations, mainly by posing as enemy groups and performing attacks. They were also complete psychopaths. Shortly after the team's formation in early 1985 the group kidnapped the base commander of Naval Station Norfolk and two FBI agents, tied them to chairs with explosives and forced them to drink water until they pissed in their pants, and filmed it. Mere months later they attacked a base in Connecticut, broke into an on-site nuclear attack submarine and planted explosives in the control room; Marcinko then get into an argument with the base commander during debriefing, leading to a complaint against him. Mere months after that they had infiltrated the naval station housing Air Force One and planted enough fake explosives near it that if they were real it would've destroyed it.
Less than a year after Red Cell began operation, it was one of the most controversial units in the entire army. In September 1985 Vice Admiral Lyons (Marcinko's boss and close friend) was promoted to Admiral, and his replacement had his eye much closer on the growing list of complaints. Marcinko, whose marriage was now falling apart, focused entirely on Red Cell. In March 1986, the group began conducting security exercises at a naval base in Seal Beach, California. The base's security chief, Robert D. Sheridan, antagonized Marcinko by refusing Red Cell access to a warehouse inside the base as an operations center, forcing them to base themselves out of a nearby dive bar. In response, Red Cell kidnapped Sheridan and brought him to a motel, ostensibly as part of one of the security exercises. Marcinko called his team members at the motel and told them to "tear him a new asshole", at which point they handcuffed Sheridan to a chair and beat and tortured him for 30 hours straight. There was no strategic reason to do this. Less than a month later, Marcinko was fired and Red Cell was disbanded.
But that wasn't the end of his troubles, a large portion of the Navy had it out for him and his aggressive and impulsive personality. in 1990, after a long trial, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government after it was revealed that he had set up a kickback scheme to siphon money from arms manufacturers. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison, during which he wrote his autobiography, Rogue Warrior, in which he claims that the charges against him were part of a witch hunt as retaliation for Red Cell's embarrassment of military base commanders and security officers. Rogue Warrior was a massively successful New York Times bestseller, and so, two years later, Marcinko wrote a follow-up book named Red Cell. And this is where I noticed something strange...
Back to Jim Carrey. Marcinko, who had previously trained SEALs and CIA officers how to endure torture, was brought in to help him endure The Grinch's makeup process. He told Carrey a variety of things he could do: He would put the TV on, and when he started to spiral, turn it off and turn the radio on instead. He would punch himself in the leg as hard as he could, and a trusted friend let him punch him in the arm. He would eat constantly, and smoke constantly. After 92 days of makeup application and removal, Carrey had made it through his scenes, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas was finished.
When I heard about this story I decided to look up Richard Marcinko and fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of SEAL Team Six and various military operations in the 80s. I also noticed his books, Rogue Warrior and Red Cell. But strangely, Rogue Warrior was listed in his bibliography under "Nonfiction", while Red Cell was listed under "Fiction", despite it supposedly being a direct sequel. So I skimmed Rogue Warrior; The book appears mostly autobiographical (albeit self-aggrandizing and often spiteful), but I noticed that it gets a bit fantastical at the end. He spends the first third of the final chapter detailing his trial and imprisonment, the middle third opining about his potential plans to turn SEAL Team Six into a private commercial organization, and the last third discussing a meeting with some shadowy beyond classified-type military figure who wanted him to lead attacks against Iraqi bases under a new version of SEAL Team Six. The book ends with "So, doom on you, Navy. I'll be back… but not in uniform. And I will not fail." He says "Doom on you" a lot, it's kind of his catchphrase.
Then I skimmed Red Cell, which begins with a supremely edgy "Ten Commandments of SpecWar" in which he non-subtly refers to himself as a God.
The rest of the book however, really is a completely fictional story. Although Rogue Warrior is (presumably) a collection of real factual anecdotes, it was ghostwritten by John Weisman, a successful writer who did both nonfiction and fiction novels with military and espionage themes. He had also done Shadow Warrior, the autobiography of CIA agent Felix Rodríguez. Marcinko, presumably annoyed that the army had not come to kiss his feet and beg him to start a new version of SEAL Team Six, decided to enlist Weisman's help and continue where Rogue Warrior left off with a fictional story where- Actually, I'll just use Wikipedia's description of the plot:
Three years after his conviction, Marcinko works as a security expert in Japan. A chance run-in with a nuclear smuggling operation at Narita Airport leads to him being brought back into the Navy to investigate. His team of SEALs uncover a plot by a former Secretary of Defense to deliver American nuclear warheads to an ultra-right wing Japanese movement.
I am NOT reading this entire novel just to find out how accurate this is, but this is an insane plot for a novel about a real guy who just got dishonorably discharged from the Navy. The novel is also written entirely in first-person, as if Marcinko is simply retelling real events in a similar way to the first book. Red Cell is also not quick to mention that it's a work of fiction; In the e-book I got at least, that fact is mentioned twice, technically. The first is a small note nestled in the publishing information, between the glowing reviews of Rogue Warrior and Marcinko's Ten Commandments. The second comes about halfway through the story:
The contracts also stipulated that if I ever repeated a word of what I heard, read, saw, or was told during the time of my activation, I'd be thrown in jail for the rest of my life sans benefit of due legal process. Furthermore, I pledged never to write another nonfiction book about my activities unless I got written permission to do so in advance from the Navy. Okay—I'd write fiction from now on. There was nothing in the agreement about writing fiction. Doom on you, Navy.
This comes during the part of the novel where the Navy has asked him to return to service and is re-promoting him to the equivalent of a captain thanks to his "unique and irreplaceable expertise". The joke here (or maybe he's being serious?) is that he is pretending Red Cell is actually another factual recollection of events and that he simply has to label it as fiction in order to skirt the terms of his (fictional) contract, as part of the (fictional) promotion he has recieved in order to take down a (fictional) government conspiracy. The book cover even reads: "Top-secret true exploits that can only be told as fiction!" Riveting stuff. There are probably some people out there who actually fell for this.
In case you believe that he actually is telling the truth, that the events of Red Cell did actually happen and he just can't talk about them even though he just did with no repercussion, a year later him and Weisman put out a third novel in the series: Green Team (1995), featuring an equally ubelievable story about Marcinko's new group foiling "a plan by a British noble of Arabic descent to incite a major Islamic fundamentalist campaign against the West." A year after that, the writing duo put out Task Force Blue (1996), which is, you guessed it, yet another fictional story about Marcinko rescuing the Secretary of the Navy from a violent militia group.
After finishing Task Force Blue, Marcinko (and Weisman) took a break from detailing his very lively and very real tales as a badass military commander to dabble in the world of business management. Introducing Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando's Guide to Success, in which he strikes the same intimidating arms-crossed pose he does in his other book covers, but this time he's wearing a suit!
By 2000, the year he was brought on to assist Jim Carrey, Marcinko and Weisman's Rogue Warrior series was now 8 books long, 7 of which were fictional. After Task Force Blue came Designation Gold (1997), SEAL Force Alpha (1998), Option Delta (1999), and Echo Platoon (2000). In 2001 Marcinko and Weisman did their final book together: Detachment Bravo. After this, Marcinko took some time off for self-reflection. This self-reflection period was helpfully documented in the ninth Rogue Warrior book Violence of Action (2002), which Marcinko picked up a new ghostwriter for, Jim deFelice. The two then added to the series with Vengeance (2005), Holy Terror (2006), and Dictator's Ransom (2008), in which North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has read all of Marcinko's books and is so impressed he hires him to help rescue an illegitimate son of his who has gone missing.
By the late 2000s, Marchinko had decided that he needed to branch out from just writing fanfiction novels about himself. Thus, he decided to partner with Bethesda Softworks to create a first-person shooter video game starring himself as the main character. Rogue Warrior, the game, is one of the worst video games ever made.
There is so much to talk about with this game, far more than I dare cover here. The game was originally planned to be called "Rogue Warrior: Black Razor" until it was scrapped, restarted from scratch, and renamed to just "Rogue Warrior". The game eventually released in 2009; The story follows Marcinko infiltrating North Korea to neutralize their nuclear weapons. You might be thinking that doesn't sound like a very in-depth plot, and that's because it's not! The entire game takes about two hours to beat. Not that you would want to play the game for even two hours, as the controls are terrible, the gunplay is terrible, the stealth mechanics are terrible, the graphics make the game look like it came out in 2002, and the dialogue from Richard "Dick" Marcinko (voiced by celebrity actor Mickey Rourke) consists almost entirely of expletives and gross insults. Possibly the most memorable part of the entire game is the bit where Marcinko yells to his enemies "Suck my balls, my hairy f***in' big balls, wrap them around your f***in' mouth." Everyone loved to hate on this game when it came out, and it deserved every bit of it.
Marcinko, the undeterred badass he is, continued writing new novels: Seize the Day (2009), Domino Theory (2011), Blood Lies (2012), and finally, Curse of the Infidel (2014), bringing the Rogue Warrior series to a grand total of one real autobiography and 16 fictional novels. He then hosted a conservative radio show until his death in 2021, at 81 years old. It is insane that he was writing fanfiction about himself until the age of 74.
Richard Marcinko was a badass. When he was fighting in Vietnam with SEAL Team Two, he was a badass. When he founded SEAL Team Six and Red cell and gave middle fingers to all the high-ranking government members who tried to get in his way he was even more of a badass. But eventually, his actions caught up to him, and he lost the ability to do badass things and just became a regular guy who was no longer involved with the military. But he couldn't adjust to the civilian life, he still really, really wanted to do badass things. He started a private security company, Red Cell International, but it wasn't enough for him, he needed the world to know just how much of a politically incorrect badass he had been and still was. And so he wrote his own history, one where the covert operations never stopped and the United States always needed his help. At the end of the day he mostly got what he wanted reputation-wise, everyone who heard about him through the Jim Carrey story just knows him as "The guy who trained CIA agents to endure torture", and if you read a little further you find out he's also "The guy who founded SEAL Team Six". But since he couldn't shut up, since he always wanted more, there is now also a large group of people who only know him as "The hairy f***in' big balls guy".
References:
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/jim-carrey-quit-grinch-makeup-torture-expert-1236607568/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXAv8RXmsrc
https://www.vulture.com/2017/12/kazuhiro-tsuji-gary-oldman-darkest-hour.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59812251
https://web.archive.org/web/20060706184806/http://www.reportingwar.com/wts061605.shtml
https://www.rferl.org/a/osama_bin_laden_who_are_navy_seals_team_six/24093647.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjhu6Z5WhKE