Jim Carrey and Amber Heard

HE’S ONE OF THE WORLD’S best-known comedy actors. But in a new interview, Jim Carrey has revealed his childhood home life was far from harmonious. The actor, 56, has opened up about his traumatic upbringing, saying that his mother, Kathleen, who passed away in 1989, battled an addiction to prescription drugs. “My mother wasn’t feeling well most of the time,” the Ace Ventura star told The Hollywood Reporter. “My mum was addicted to pain medication.”

In the interview, Carrey admitted to feeling abandoned by his mother. “She was very sick in a lot of ways,” he said. “She was lovely, too, but she was a child of alcoholics and she had issues. And that’s not intentional abandonment—she was always there for me, she was always there in the house—but if you’re high on painkillers, that’s abandonment.”

In spite of his difficult upbringing, he became one of Hollywood’s highest paid actors, earning $20 million for The Cable Guy in 1996, but now Carrey shuns the limelight. “My plan was not to join Hollywood, it was to destroy it,” he said in the interview. “Like, take a gigantic sledgehammer to the leading man and to all the seriousness.” Asked why he turned his back on Hollywood, Carrey, who lives alone in Los Angeles, continued, “I just didn’t want to be in the business anymore.” Fame, for him, is not what it’s cracked up to be. “You can dream about it all you want, but until you get it, you don’t realise that it’s really not a place that’s very comfortable for very long.”

The actor is no stranger to dealing with personal pain. In 2015, his ex-girlfriend Cathriona White died after taking a cocktail of prescription drugs. Following claims Carrey supplied the drugs that killed White, the actor released a statement in 2016, saying, “Cat’s troubles were born long before I met her and sadly her tragic end was beyond anyone’s control.”

Recently, it seems, Carrey has found solace in art. The star’s Twitter account is almost solely dedicated to his political cartoons and artworks—and the Trump administration has been the subject of much of his current work. “To watch half the country ignore what is quite obviously right in front of them, I liken it to standing on the railroad tracks cheering for the locomotive that’s about to run you down.” •

The actor on leaving Hollywood, politics and his private pain

Carrey was a pallbearer at the funeral of his late ex-girlfriend Cathriona White, in October 2015. “My father could have been a great comedian,” Carrey said of his late father, Percy Carrey (pictured with his mother, Kathleen).

“We don’t matter,” Carrey said of celebrities in a 2017 red carpet interview with E! News at New York Fashion Week.