You Might've Missed This How the Grinch Stole Christmas Editing Error

This editing from How the Grinch Stole Christmas is sure to steal your attention.

In the 2000 holiday film based on Dr. Seuss' book by the same name, there's a scene where Jim Carrey's character the Grinch, who hates Christmas, returns home after nearly ruining a festive celebration put on by the nearby town of Whoville—only to be shocked to learn that he still hasn't squashed their spirits. While the scene may not stand out at first, it caught the attention of one social media user for a particular reason. And it has to do with…the Grinch's eyes?

Yes! TikTok user @redcobweb noticed the color of the Grinch's eyes change from a yellowish green—the shade they are for the majority of the film—to Carrey's actual eye color brown and then back again.

"So every time I watch the Grinch I notice this one little mistake they made where they forget either to put his contacts in or they forgot to edit them in afterwards," the content creator noted. "And so Jim Carrey's brown eyes are just there."

Pausing the video so followers could see the difference for themselves, they added, "You'll see it. Right there! Those are his, like, brown eyes. And then in the next scene, they're back to that."

Many viewers couldn't believe they hadn't spotted the switch before. "All the times I've seen this movie I never noticed that," one commenter wrote, "and I'll never unsee it." Added another, "Very observant!"

However, others wondered if this was done on purpose. "Literally feels like it was intentional because it looks like cartoon pupils?" one follower wrote. "I don't know. Just kinda feels right where it is to me." Added another, "I love it like this lol I thought it was intentional."

Then Universal Pictures All-Access' TikTok entered the chat. "Jim Carrey is so good he wasn't using contacts," the account replied. "That's all acting."

In the past, Carrey has spoken about wearing contact lenses for his character's transformation. 

"I was in hell in that Grinch costume, too," the actor told Playboy in 2004. "It was like knives were stuck in my eyes."

Alas, he was able to push through. "It was just the worst situation comfort-wise you could possibly imagine," the Bruce Almighty alum added. "But still, when they said 'Action!' I was free, you know? There's something about that suspended life moment. When they say 'Action!' I'm free."

In fact, it took about eight and a half hours to do all the Grinch makeup on the first day. However, he claimed someone was brought in to help with any discomfort.

"I went back to my trailer and put my leg through the wall and told [director] Ron Howard that I couldn't do the movie," Carrey said on The Graham Norton Show in 2014. "And then [producer] Brian Grazer came in, and being the fix-it man, and came up with a brilliant idea, which was to hire a gentleman who is trained to teach CIA operatives how to endure torture. So that's how I got through the Grinch."

For more fascinating facts about Carrey, keep reading... 

1. Jim Carrey was born in the Toronto suburb of Newmarket, Ontario, Canada as the youngest of four children.

3. In seventh grade, a teacher offered Jim the chance to spend 15 minutes in front of the class at the end of the day if he would just let his classmates work in peace. So, he would spend his spare time after he'd finished his work making notes on the bits he wanted to try out. "Even then I was ruffling feathers," he told Rolling Stone in 1995.

5. Percy helped Jim begin his comedy career, driving him to Toronto's Yuk Yuk club for his debut. Wearing a yellow suit made by his mom, he bombed.

6. As his stand-up got better, he caught the attention of the legendary Rodney Dangerfield, who hired him to open for him on tour, taking him to Las Vegas.

8. After meeting aspiring actress Melissa Wormer as she worked as a waitress at the Comedy Store, they got married in 1987. Their daughter Jane, who once competed on American Idol, was born later that year.

10. Dating Jenny McCarthy from 2005-2010, the couple became famous proponents of the anti-vaccine community, believing the MMR vaccine to be the cause of autism.

7. He once dated singer Linda Ronstadt for 8 months in the early ‘80s.

9. After meeting Lauren Holly on the set of Dumb and Dumber, they got married in 1996, a marriage that lasted less than a year.

12. In 1996, he was offered the role of the Eighth Doctor on Doctor Who. He declined. 

16. In the late '90s and early 2000s, Carrey was romantically linked to his Me, Myself and Irene co-star Renee Zellweger, to whom he was engaged for a brief time.

17. In 1999 and 2000, he won back-to-back Golden Globe Awards for The Truman Show and Man on the Moon. On the latter film, in which he starred as comedy legend Andy Kaufman, he took Method acting to the extreme. As co-star Paul Giamatti told Buzzfeed in 2013, "It was a very strange experience. It was one of the weirdest experiences I've had making a movie, to be honest with you. It was just wacky. Jim was wacky during it. He did this whole thing where he was Andy Kaufman all the time when he was on set and when he was in the costume, and was Tony Clifton all the time when he was Tony Clifton. When he was Tony Clifton, he had cheese — Limburger cheese — in his pockets so he smelled horrible. And he'd constantly be hugging people, and he had it all over his hands and stuff. It was disgusting. He was touching people and making them shake his hands all the time. He smelled horrible. Like, really bad. It was just weird. And that's the least of it."

14. In 1990, a then-struggling Carrey wrote himself a $10 million check for "acting services rendered" that he dated Thanksgiving 1995. By the time he was cast in 1994's Dumb and Dumber, his salary had reached that magic number and he left the check in his dad's casket as he was buried that year.

19. After Carrey's former girlfriend Cathriona White was found dead from a prescription drug overdose in a suspected suicide in 2015 and he served as pallbearer at the funeral in her native Ireland, he was hit with two wrongful death lawsuits, one from her husband and one from her mother. "What a terrible shame," he said in a statement after the first was filed. "Cat's troubles were born long before I met her and sadly her tragic end was beyond anyone's control. I really hope that some day soon people will stop trying to profit from this and let her rest in peace." Both cases were thrown out in 2018.

20. When he became an American citizen in 2004, he didn't renounce his Canadian citizenship and, instead, retained dual citizenship. And it paid off. That same year, he was inducted into the Canadian Walk of Fame. (He's yet to earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.) And a full decade later, he was honored by Canada Post with a postage stamp.

(E! and Universal Pictures are both part of the NBCUniversal family).

This story was first published on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022 at 1:10 pm. PT.

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