In 2018, Jim Carrey received a message telling him he had 10 minutes left to live. The 58-year-old actor was living in Hawaii when a text alert was sent out warning of an incoming ballistic missile threat.
Carrey recounted the terrifying experience on Thursday’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, telling the host about a blurred photo of himself that’s being used as the cover for his novel, Memoirs and Misinformation.
“That cover is actually my face after being told that I had 10 minutes to live,” Carrey revealed. “And that’s for real. A fake missile alert in Hawaii. I was there. I was writing. My assistant Linda called me, she was crying, she said, ‘We have 10 minutes left.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘The missiles are coming.'”
Alfred A. Knopf
Carrey said the alert, which later proved to be false, was “completely real to us” in the moment.
“I tried to get off the island to my daughter. I couldn’t get off the island,” he said. “The question was posed — should we all try to get together? I said, ‘I don’t want to die in my car.’ And we had to say goodbye.”
So Carrey revealed that he spent what he thought would be his final moments in a peaceful setting.
“I sat on the lanai and looked out at the ocean,” he recalled. “At that point, I just started going, ‘OK, well, what can I do with this last moment of time?’ And I just decided to go through a list of gratitudes. I could not stop thinking of wonderful things that have happened to me and blessings I’ve had. It was lovely. And I got to a point of grace with about two minutes to spare when I found out it wasn’t actually happening. And all I was planning to do was close my eyes and be thankful because it’s been a good ride.”
When Fallon asked him how he reacted to the news that the missile alert was fake, Carrey quipped, “Then I got pissed off and heads rolled!”
The alert, which went out in January 2018, was later revealed to be the result of “human error,” according to The New York Times.
