“I was with Jim for years, and people didn’t realize—they all think it’s just the marriage that was short, but we were together for a long time,” Holly said on Canada’s George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight in 2013.
True, George’s last name does feel slightly longer than the Dumb and Dumber costars’ 10-month marriage. And on paper, you wouldn’t guess years: the movie came out in 1994, Carrey’s first marriage officially ended in 1995 and then he married Holly in 1996. Sounds pretty whirlwind.
But movies aren’t shot days before they come out and divorces can take awhile, at least two years in this case. (“I feel for Melissa, but they were completely apart when Jim and I met,” Holly told Rolling Stone in 1995. Carrey said of his ex, “She’s lucky to be out of my life. I’m in a different time zone at this point. I was headed there when we were together, so it’s OK. Everything is fine. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”)
“It was sort of when all the tabloids started happening,” Holly recalled the climate in which their relationship flamed and fizzled. “They start to find their voice, and those ‘insider’ shows, and they would go to my high school and everything. And at first it was kind of fun, and then our whole life became about ‘we have to keep them about,’ because they would do things like scale the fence at our house and live in our backyard and take pictures through our window.”
George asked if they ever threw weird stuff in the garbage for the reporters to find just to screw with them.
“Yeah, because I lived with Jim Carrey,” Holly said with a smile. “Rest assured that that happened and…yeah.”
But “when we got divorced, I had a really hard time,” she acknowledged, “because no one really had the story right or anything, and I always felt like everybody knew my personal business—and not to mention the fact that I was going through a heartbreak… So now, I see the shift, where people become famous by courting that attention, and that’s the only thing they’re famous for.”
The talented people she’s always admired, Holly added, “aren’t a part of that.”
And we know Carrey’s view of fame has only grown more complicated as the years have gone by.