In 2007, I spent a week in Hollywood visiting my son, Mark. He was writing a screenplay for his movie, STRINGS and would later direct and co-produce the film.

He was busy, but I had plenty to do sightseeing and interviewing such stars as Mike Myers, Justin Timberlake, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Julie Andrews, Antonio Banderas and more.

Besides being in the audience for tapings of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres and others, I also enjoyed visiting the Hollywood Wax Museum and taking a double decker tour bus.

Paused at a traffic light, on our right a red convertible stopped next to us. The driver stood up, with his hand above his brow line, appeared to be scouting or lost.

“I hear there’s famous movie stars around here,” he yelled at us. “Have you seen any yet?”

We all reacted in loud applause. It was Jim Carrey!

“For years, I lived in a van with my family,” years later he opened up. “But in my mind, I was already a star.”

Jim Carrey was 15 years old when his family became homeless.Not because of addiction. Not because of poor choices. Because his father did everything “right”—and it still wasn’t enough.Percy Carrey was a musician.

A talented saxophonist who dreamed of playing professionally. But when Jim was born, Percy made the “responsible” choice.He gave up music. He took a “safe” job as an accountant at a factory to provide for his family.For years, it worked.

The Carrey family—Percy, his wife Kathleen, and their four children—lived modestly but safely in Newmarket, Ontario.

Then, when Jim was 12, Percy was laid off. Just like that. No warning. No safety net. The “safe” job disappeared.

The family couldn’t pay rent. They lost their home. And they moved into a 1970s Volkswagen Camper van. Jim, his parents, and his three siblings—crammed into a van, parking in empty lots, on backroads, anywhere they could find space. At 15, he was worrying about where his family would sleep that night. His mother, Kathleen, was chronically ill. His father was devastated—humiliated that he couldn’t provide.

The man who had sacrificed his dream for security had lost everything anyway. Jim made a decision.He would save his family. Not with a “safe” job. With laughter.

To help support the family, Jim and his siblings took janitorial jobs at the same factory where their father had worked as an accountant. Every day after school, 15-year-old Jim Carrey cleaned toilets, mopped floors, and scrubbed machinery in the place that had destroyed his father’s dignity.It was brutal. Humiliating. Soul-crushing.But Jim would come home to that van, look in the mirror, and practice.Faces. Voices. Characters. Impressions.

He made his family laugh. Even when they had nothing, they had that.

“Sometimes, all we had to survive the day was laughter,” Jim later said.

At 16, Jim’s father drove him to a comedy club in Toronto for his first open mic. Jim bombed. Hard. The crowd was silent. He walked off stage humiliated. But Percy believed in him.

“You’re funny, Jim. You just need to find your voice.”

So Jim kept going. Night after night. Performing in dingy clubs. Getting heckled. Getting rejected. When he was 19, Jim moved to Los Angeles to pursue comedy and acting full-time. He auditioned constantly. And heard the same thing over and over:

“You’re too weird.”

“You’re too much.”

“We don’t know what to do with you.”

He battled depression. Anxiety. The fear that maybe they were right—maybe he was too weird. Maybe his dad had sacrificed for nothing.But Jim kept a secret weapon: belief.

In 1985, broke and struggling, Jim drove up to the Hollywood Hills, parked his beat-up Toyota, and looked out over Los Angeles. He pulled out his checkbook and wrote himself a check for $10 million. In the memo line, he wrote: “For acting services rendered.”

His name is Jim Carrey. He’s proof that the people who make us laugh the hardest are often the ones who’ve cried the most in silence.

He dated it Thanksgiving 1995—ten years in the future. He folded that check and kept it in his wallet. Every single day. A reminder. A promise.

“This is going to happen.”

Jim worked relentlessly. Small roles. Bit parts. Sketch comedy on In Living Color, where his physical comedy and characters finally found an audience.

Then in 1994, three films came out back-to-back: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber.

All three were massive hits. Jim Carrey became a household name overnight. And just before Thanksgiving 1994—one year earlier than he’d written on that check—Jim was offered $10 million to star in Dumb and Dumber. Exactly $10 million.

The fake check he’d written a decade earlier had become real.But there was a tragedy woven into his triumph. In September 1994, just as Jim’s career exploded, his father Percy died.

At Percy’s funeral, Jim placed that $10 million check—the one he’d carried for nearly a decade—in his father’s casket.”

He was my biggest fan,” Jim said through tears. “And I wanted him to know… we made it.”

Jim Carrey went on to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world. The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Man on the Moon—he proved he wasn’t just a comedian. He was an artist.

Jim has always been open about the darkness behind the laughter. He’s spoken publicly about his battles with depression. About feeling empty even at the height of fame. About realizing that success doesn’t heal childhood trauma.

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of,” Jim once said, “so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

What is the answer, according to Jim?

Connection. Love. Purpose. The ability to lift others. Jim’s father taught him the most important lesson not by succeeding, but by failing: Don’t give up on what you love just because you’re scared. Percy gave up music for “security.” And he lost everything anyway.Jim refused to make that mistake. He chose the risky path. The weird path. The path everyone said wouldn’t work.And it did.

Today, Jim Carrey, now in his 60s, rarely acts anymore. He paints. He speaks about spirituality, consciousness, and the illusion of ego.

His journey of personal reflection eventually led him to come to know Christ. He found Jesus and found meaning and direction in his life.

Sharing Jesus

Jim, talking with fans via radio, said that “ultimately, I believe that suffering leads to salvation. And in fact, it’s the only way that we have to somehow accept and not deny, but feel our suffering and feel our losses. Then we made one of two decisions. We either decide to go through the gate of resentment, which leads to vengeance, self-harm, harm to others. Or we go through the gate of forgiveness, which leads to grace.”

Further, he remarked, “And your being here is an indication that you’ve made that decision, right? You’ve made the decision to walk through the gate of forgiveness to grace. Just as Christ did on the cross. He suffered terribly, and He was broken by it to the point of doubt and a feeling of absolute abandonment.”

He’s used his platform to talk about mental health, to encourage people to pursue what they love, to remind the world that the people who make us laugh are often the ones who’ve cried the most. Because laughter was his survival tool. It’s how he made sense of living in a van and watching his mother suffer or seeing his father broken.

He turned pain into comedy. Trauma into art.

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